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User ID: 2225
dovetailing
1yr ago
[Johnson]: "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
I'd like to soapbox a bit about this.
Johnson is absolutely right on this, maybe more than he knows. One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.
Having sexual attraction to other men may be (generally is) involuntary, but engaging in homosexual activity is absolutely a choice, and so is making your desires such a core part of your identity that you automatically interpret any discouragement from gratifying them as an attack on your self. Yet that last choice is, in the prevailing culture, the water that the fish don't know they are swimming in. They are told, "Those people hate you, they want to deny you the right to even exist" because of their opposition to behavior.
People with disordered desires need a narrative other than "you are a disgusting pervert" or "your desires are innate and good and self-actualization means fulfilling them". The bit about "same-sex-attracted" is a (somewhat awkward) way of trying to supply that other narrative.
I think the same is true about "trans". A boy or man who desperately wants to be female, and/or who experiences discomfort at being male, may not be choosing to have those feelings (though they can certainly be fed and encouraged by dwelling on them), but "I am trans" is a decision to adopt those feelings and desires as as an identity. I can't think of any non-awkward way of encapsulating those underlying feelings and desires (yeah, "gender dysphoria", but that carries its own set of assumptions and also doesn't capture the full range here), but the discourse really needs one.
I'm very sympathetic to people saddled with these disordered feelings -- this is not really to my credit, but out of personal experience, as my other posts on the "trans" subject attest -- but I get really angry at the activists who encourage people to see them as a core part of their identity, and accuse opponents of wanting to "deny [their] right to exist". It's like telling an alcoholic that being a "drunkard" is a core part of their identity and that anyone who wants them to stop drinking hates them.
"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
dovetailing
9mo ago
Given the content at the links this reads like thick irony.
dovetailing
1yr ago
My theory is that the "right side of history" narrative (and its close cousins, casting being progressive as just being a "decent human being" and denigrating opposition as "retrograde" or "reactionary") is so ubiquitous because the progressive left is deeply confused about whether it believes in moral realism, and so adopts an inconsistent (but very effective) posture on moral questions.
On these big social questions, there are, at root, three reasons for acting:
- You are a moral realist and believe that X is right/wrong as a fundamental fact about reality. (How do you know? Maybe you believe God -- who knows such things -- said so; maybe you believe you have a direct apprehension of the truth; maybe it is a logical consequence of other things that are in the first two categories.) You act because you think it is right, period.
- You have a preference that you want to fulfill, and think that you and those who share it have the power -- or can obtain the power -- to enforce it. You act out of pure preference and power.
- You just want to go along to get along. You don't have an independent reason to act, so you don't act independently -- maybe you stay out of it, or maybe you join a cause you think will imminently win (or is most of your social circle) so that people will like you.
"The right side of history" tries to have it all three ways while not committing enough to any of them to expose weakness there.
Straightforward moral realism is a problem for the progressive left (at least in its modern incarnation; past movements vary) for two reasons. First, because most of its thought leaders are not moral realists, and many of the rest would reject moral realism if the question were put to them (though they may implicitly act as if they believed in it). Second, because the natural response to "It is a moral law of the universe that [insert progressive cause here] is good" is to say: "And how do you know? I'm pretty sure I've always heard that God said the opposite, my intuitions disagree, and anyway you just got done telling me that you don't believe in hearing from God, so why should I believe you?"
Straightforward appeals to power or preference are not persuasive -- at least not unless you already have the power and just want to compel, not "win hearts and minds".
And finally, appealing to people's "go along to get along" instincts is tough unless you can offer social proof that either your cause already dominates, or soon will. (It works wonders when you can, though -- see what happened to gay marriage.)
Enter "the right side of history". It appeals to moral realist intuitions and persuasive force, while not actually committing anyone to staking out an actual claim about ground truth morality. It can be a threat based on present or claimed future power without being explicit about it. It appeals to "go along to get along" without having to actually produce the goods in terms of current social influence.
Time will tell (ha) about whether the rhetorical strategy will continue to be effective, but I expect that, absent major ideological realignment, it will continue to be used in one form or another.
dovetailing
10mo 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.
dovetailing
1yr ago
Who the hell wants to ban porn?
Quite a few people, actually. Even on the ACX survey (not a demographic known for its social conservatism) over a quarter of respondents said that they would wave a magic wand to end pornography permanently if offered the choice. Now making something magically disappear is not quite the same as banning it for a number of reasons, but the sentiment is much the same.
You might be confused because of all those statistics indicating that 90%+ of men have used porn. Past, or even current, porn use is not inconsistent with wanting it to not exist. People don't have perfect self-control, after all, and it is Well Known that people have diminished judgement and self-control under... relevant circumstances. Many people are quite capable of disapproving even of their own vices, and think that it's bad to have widely available temptations for them and others to succumb to them.
I am almost certain that banning internet porn is part of the intention of laws like these, not an accidental consequence. For the state of Texas (and for other states with similar laws) this is the system Working As Intended.
dovetailing
2yr ago
Part III: On Desire
Let's take a step back and do a little philosophy.
Desire is a funny thing. It seems to refer to several different things, but these things are connected and bleed into each other. At the least, I can identify four different types:
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Desire-as-passion: thus the desire to eat when hungry, to have sex when horny, to engage in violence when angry, and so on. The 'animal' level, so to speak.
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Desire-to-experience: thus the desire for beautiful scenery, like a waterfall or a sunset, or to see a great painting.
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Desire-to-possess: Not necessarily as property, but being able to call that which is desired one's own, in some sense. Thus a man might desire a wife (or to marry a particular person); or someone might desire to have a best friend. But ownership, too, as one might desire to have one's own house and to put one's own stamp on it.
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Desire-to-be: Thus a person who desires strength wishes to be strong; a person who desires virtue wishes to be virtuous.
Some things are properly (up to you whether this refers to natural law or merely to normal psychology; it works either way) desired in one way or another, and some in multiple ways. Thus it is proper to desire-to-experience a beautiful waterfall, a little silly and quite selfish to desire-to-possess it, and ludicrous to desire-to-be the waterfall. On the other hand, particular skill is something that one might reasonably both desire-to-experience (to see the master at work) and desire-to-be (to become a master one's self).
The above may not be the best possible classification of desire, but it will do for our purposes.
Part IV: Bleeding Desires as Etiology of Positive-Primary Trans
When I had my first crush, at around age 11, I was fixated on the object of my affection in all the usual awkward ways that a boy having his first crush does. I'll spare you the embarrassing details. But one thought, so potent and so strange that it has stuck with me for the decades since, was this: "I want to be her; but failing that, being with her is a good second-best."
Which is to say, my normal desire-to-possess had thoroughly bled into an unusual desire-to-be.
The thing about the Blanchard autogynephilic typing is that it is obviously true. A lot of MtF trans people were, apparently, highly masculine (c.f. Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner) before transitioning, and a lot of them seemed to have sexual fetishes around being a woman. The other thing about the Blanchard autogynephilic typing is that it is obviously false. A lot of MtF trans people that the Blanchard typology would categorize in that way report that there was a lot going on other than autogynephilia, and that the autogynephilia was not the primary consideration.
The standard Blanchardian answer, as I understand it, is that (a) autogynephilia is an "erotic target location error", and that (b) the other feelings reported by the autogynephilic types are sublimations of this erotic feeling. While this is not entirely implausible, it seems like too much of a false-consciousness hypothesis and gives too little credence to the internal reports of the people themselves. Moreover, it is rather contradicted by my own experience, to which I am inclined to give a good bit of credit.
Instead, I propose that the real source, of both the autogynephilia and the other parts of the often intense desire to be female (to posess a female body, to have feminine qualities, to present in a feminine way), is this bleeding of desire. A man will properly desire-to-experience and desire-to-possess femininity, to see and touch a woman, to call her his wife, to admire her, and so one; he will properly desire-to-be some masculine qualities and virtues (strength, stoic steadfastness, etc.). But what happens if these desires bleed and mingle; if desire-to-experience and desire-to-possess are also experienced as desire-to-be? "I want to be her." Or, more generally: "I want to be female, with a female body and feminine characteristics."
Now, say that these are your feelings. You dive a little too deep into these desires; take them a little too seriously; allow them to shape your self-image and identity (and the "trans" label and memeplex certainly encourages that! though it can absolutely happen in its absence) -- and now, maybe, you start to believe in them; to believe that you really are, deep down a woman or girl, not a man or boy; to believe that you will be fundamentally unhappy if your desires are unrealized; to be horribly uncomfortable with your maleness and male body because it means that you are not female with a female body...
Part V: A Self-Indulgent Epilogue
So, given that the egg_irl bait story at the beginning was me, how is it that I didn't fall down the trans slippery slope I just described, and am happy and successful as a mostly normal (albeit very nerdy) man?
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I grew up in a setting where "trans" was not in the water. It wasn't until I found that brief treatment in a textbook that I even knew anything in that vicinity was a thing.
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I correctly identified my fantasies as fantasy. That my desire to be female had the same likelihood of being fulfilled as the childhood desire to magically fly under my own power as in Peter Pan; which is to say, none at all.
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I had (and have) religious beliefs that preclude acting on these desires.
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Eventually, introspection on my feelings and thoughts led me to the above assessment of their source. Knowing why I have this disordered desire is a great step to overcoming it.
Even still, the desires and fantasies were sometimes overwhelmingly strong (see the part about lucid dreaming and self-hypnosis). I don't think I'm at risk anymore, but in the absence of the above factors, I think that younger-me could have, to his massive detriment, gone the other way.
Frankly, I think I dodged a bullet.
dovetailing
2yr ago
Inaugurating my participation at themotte.org with a new handle because I'm not sure I want the following post to be connected to me in real life.
Every time the psychology of trans stuff comes up at ACX or here I want to write this essay; this time I finally did.
Toward an Etiology of Trans
Part I: Two Stories
Our first story is about a boy who we will call Sam. From well before puberty, Sam had thoughts about wanting to be a girl. A favorite passage in his children's books was the one in The Land of Oz where the enchantment on the hero Tip is undone, transforming the boy into the princess Ozma. He didn't much like the things that motivated other boys: sewing and crochet were more interesting than sports. And his sense of aesthetics was (and remained) more feminine than masculine -- pastel colors and flowers, not bold colors and cars. He especially liked cut gemstones, and wanted to wear rings.
As he got older, Sam would frequently fantasize about being magically transformed into a girl; in puberty, his very minor gynecomastia (just little nodules under the nipples) provided fuel for these fantasies. As a teen, he discovered in an old development textbook a description of "transsexual reassignment", which occupied his attention for a while, though it seemed no more realistic than his fantasies of magical transformation. A sexual side to his fantasies was emerging, too: autogynephilia (though he had no word for it); but the fantasies were not only sexual ones. As well as a female body, Sam wanted feminine traits: beauty and sweetness and the freedom to adorn oneself with dresses and jewels.
Sam observed that his fondest nighttime dreams were ones where he was a girl. He practiced lucid dreaming and experimented with self-hypnosis largely in order to encourage these dreams, and to better imagine and better half-believe, in that partly-conscious realm at the boundary to sleep, in his feminine transformation.
These fantasies continued, more-or-less, into his young adulthood. He practiced less deliberate lucid dreaming, but savored the dreams when they came. But he kept them secret -- how weird it would be, for a man to confess to wishing he could become a woman, much less that these fantasies were often arousing. And in any case, they were impossible desires for what could only happen by magic; Ozma and Tiresias don't exist in the real world.
Our second story is about another boy; we will call him Hilary. Hilary was a typical boy of the nerdy type. He liked dinosaurs and astronomy and collected rocks and coins. He was especially good at math, and liked to spend time playing video games and learning to program in Basic.
When Hilary hit puberty and middle school, he had his first intense crush on a girl, which of course went nowhere. That didn't stop; his life from then on was a series of such crushes, of course on all of the smartest girls he knew, and each of them life-shattering (hah). In the meantime he excelled at math competitions, learned more programming, and played Civ and Starcraft and similar games. He fantasized about someday being a great mathematician.
Hilary finally had a girlfriend in college, though it didn't work out. A while after college, he found a woman who was pretty and smart and who consented to marry him. He has a happy marriage, a satisfying life and community, and a job in tech.
Sam, of course, seems like a clear example of the MtF trans type. /r/egg_irl would have a field day. Hilary, on the other hand, is pretty clearly a standard, well-adjusted man, though in the "nerd" rather than the "jock" mold. Pretty different, right?
The reader will have guessed that, of course, Sam and Hilary are one and the same person, whose story is simply told from different points of view.
The astute reader will have also guessed that they are both me.
Part II: Trans is not a Fundamental Category
The trans movement, to the extent to which it can be said to have a coherent philosophy and not just a number of disagreeing proponents, appears to assert two things:
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Male and Female, Man and Woman, are not fundamental, biological things. Whatever their specific theories, the "trans X are X" formulation and all manner of similar things imply that one can "really be" a man or woman according to one's choice, perhaps with some hormonal help, not subject to the diktat of mere biology.
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Being Trans, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of one's identity. One can see this by the typical reaction to statements to the effect that social transition, hormone treatments, and surgeries are misguided and harmful to the people undergoing them: the immediate outcry is that the speaker wants to "harm Trans people", or is "transphobic", or worse.
The first part of my thesis is that this is the reverse of the truth. Male and Female are fundamental, biological things; notwithstanding edge cases like intersex conditions, and social dimensions to behavior and dress, there really are fundamental differences between men and woman. Many of these differences are gross physical ones associated with sexual reproduction. Others are secondary, but highly, highly correlated (I'll leave the obligatory discussion of clusters in high-dimensional space to the reader's imagination). In the vast majority of these ways, the vast majority of trans people fit their natal sex better than their desired/chosen one, and the medical treatments provide at best poor facsimiles (the dreams of an actual transformation from man to woman or the reverse remain fully in the realm of fantasy).
On the other hand, Trans as an identity is largely chosen and a social matter. Now, let me make clear what I am saying and not saying here. Taking the example of MtF, I affirm that the following are real things:
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Desiring to have a female body, whether this desire is sexual (autogynephilia), nonsexual, or (more likely) both.
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Desiring to be feminine (in other ways).
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Having some key interests or tastes which are more typically feminine than masculine.
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Feeling uncomfortable in one's male body.
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Having distaste for masculine things / feeling unsuited for a masculine role.
(I am avoiding the term "gender dysphoria" -- it's a vague description, covering multiple of the above items, which frequently masquerades as an explanation.)
But the choice to label having some assortment of these feelings as "Trans" is a choice, not a natural category or fundamental identity, and is highly subject to social norms and pressures, as evinced in the recent explosion of Trans identification.
While both positive (wanting-to-be) and negative (wanting-to-not-be) feelings do frequently co-occur (and from the movement rhetoric, there is the expectation that they will always co-occur), I get the impression, partly from anecdotal evidence and partly from introspection, that often one set is primary and the other is secondary -- with the secondary one perhaps caused by fixation on the primary. Much has already been written about the etiology of negative-primary trans, particularly in FtM cases, where young women who are depressed and generally uncomfortable with their bodies due to puberty and for social (or other) reasons become convinced that their femaleness is the problem and that they would be happier if they were male or sexless.
The other major case, positive-primary in MtF, seems stuck in either the Blanchard-Bailey categorization, which asserts that most of these are driven by autogynephilia, or in its emphatic denial.
(Continued in reply)
dovetailing
7mo 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
10mo ago
I know this is probably not actionable for you at this point but this kind of stuff is yet another reason why "wait until you're married for sex" works so much better. When we got married both my wife and I were completely inexperienced (we were both virgins) and we were both terrible at sex. But because we were married and trusted each other, there was nothing hard about admitting ignorance and inexperience and hangups, and now we have had years to get good at making each other happy. I have no clue whether anything I've learned is transferable or not, but I don't have to care because I only have to please one woman, not all of them.
dovetailing
7mo 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
11mo ago
I have not read most of the books on that list, but from the ones I have it does not bode well. The Great Gatsby is fine, but massively overrated. The same goes for Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Others are mediocre at best with a lot of flaws (Lord of the Flies) or simply execrable (On The Road, a book whose only redeeming quality is that it did an excellent job of making me detest the narrator). And the authors of the list seem to take pleasure in selecting books which had, at one point or another, been banned for obscenity, which certainly sheds some light on their criteria for greatness.
On the other hand, the books they chose not to include are also telling. How can you make a list of the best 100 twentieth-century novels and not include The Lord of the Rings (a contender for #1, and it's not in their list of 100!)? They also seem to think that anything that could be construed as "children's literature" is beneath them, though for my money this includes some of the best literature. Notably omitted is Anne of Green Gables as well as, as far as I can tell, every single Newbery winner (I'd single out A Wrinkle in Time, as well as it's more-mature sequel A Swiftly Tilting Planet (not a Newbery winner), as being particularly good).
All of which is to say, this list surely embodies somebody's idea of a good book, but it's somebody to whose recommendations I'd give negative weight.
dovetailing
1yr ago
In all seriousness: find a private tutor that works with gifted kids. It won't be cheap -- you can expect to spend somewhere in the $50-$200 per lesson range -- but it will be cheaper than an actually good private school, and while he won't have the peer group, at least he'll have someone who is capable of working with his educational needs. (Though it sounds like you personally may have this covered with homeschooling -- and that's awesome if you do.)
My wife actually does some of this (she also works with struggling kids too, since there's a lot more demand for that kind of tutoring), and for a while had a student in almost exactly your situation (down to the region of the country) -- a second (?) grader doing roughly sixth grade level math (though of course they were not using a normal curriculum). Unfortunately the student had to quit because something happened and the family could no longer afford it, I think.
The main reason that most schools are not willing to do anything for gifted kids is that there's so little real demand for it that they can just not bother. Even most parents of gifted kids are not willing to really invest, and are satisfied with the kid getting As and being in a million activities. Or they are more concerned with their kids maxing out the metrics in the system they are in -- grades, test scores, impressive sounding extracurriculars -- than with actually getting them the best education. Either way, accommodating the real needs of gifted kids is not on the schools' radar because it's not the parents' priority.
PS: If anyone reading this has an elementary or middle school age kid who is gifted in math, can meet before 7 PM eastern time, and is able to handle doing tutoring lessons over Zoom, DM me -- my wife might be interested. (Yes, Zoom is not as good as in person, but she's had a lot of experience with it at this point and can make it work surprisingly well.)
PPS: If you are homeschooling an elementary aged kid who is gifted in math and are not using Beast Academy, do yourself a favor and look into it. My wife swears by it as a gifted curriculum, and you can either (a) just buy the books and use them for homeschooling, (b) enroll in an online class through Art of Problem Solving, or (c) find a private tutor (like my wife) who is familiar with it to work with your kid.
dovetailing
1yr ago
FWIW I agree with both @hydroacetylene and you here, and I expect that he'd agree with you too. What I would mean, and what I expect he means, by "trans isn't real" is that none of the people being classified as "trans" are "born into the wrong body" or "assigned" the wrong gender, nor are they "really" (in some sense) the opposite sex -- that it's not just a matter of overdiagnosis and a classification of some people as "trans" who aren't, while there is still some smaller subset who are "really trans" and where that the most appropriate treatment is the constellation of "gender-affirming" (what a euphemism!) treatments of hormones/surgery/social transition/etc.
I do agree that there is a separate mental illness (probably more than one) which correspond to "trans" -- that it's not just depression or anxiety or whatever that causes boys/men to want to be girls/women (or vice-versa), or to be unhappy because they aren't, or to (at times) convince themselves that they "really are" what they want to be. And I get that there are some people who don't believe that and think that the entirety of "trans" is just some current-day-cultural nonsense. But I do think that there is a meaningful and important sense in which "trans isn't real" is true, and I think that's what he's getting at.
dovetailing
7mo 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
7mo 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
1yr ago
The explanation you are looking for is "great circles". Your flight probably took close to the shortest route.
dovetailing
7mo 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
1yr ago
Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.
And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.
This. I think most Mottizens' model of the situation would be much improved my thinking of trans as primarily an unusual set of desires/preferences rather than as delusion or attention-seeking (or even, directly, an attempt to get one's rocks off). The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex. The delusion, if it's there, is probably a consequence of that desire. Is that desire is born of a fetish or fetish-like sexual thing (AGP), or some emotional thing, or some complicated combination of these, or even of some external source like trauma? Probably each of these for different people (my money's on the complicated combination for most, though). But I strongly suspect that things almost never start with delusion.
Somewhat of a side note, but I find it relevant that quite a few philosophies and religions teach that mastering or overcoming your desires is a key to living well. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity don't have too much in common philosophically, but they are all in agreement on that point. (Even then there are major differences -- Christianity teaches that some desires must be expunged and the others rightly ordered, while my understanding is that Buddhism thinks that they all have to go. But the common point is that if you can't rule your desires, they will rule you, to your detriment.)
dovetailing
1yr ago
I don't think that people who are grossed out by gay sex think of that as part of their identity, though. They think that their emotions are tapping into something real on that topic, but they don't make an identity out of grossed-out-by-gayness. For the most part, at least, they trust those emotions, not identify with them.
But on the meta level, the object level matters (heh). Yes, I think that adopting some identities is good, and adopting others is bad; that sexual desires are bad things to have as identities; that people would be better off if society discouraged people from adopting these bad identities -- or at least didn't put its thumb on the scale the other way as currently.
Or for those who prefer quotations on the subject, from Heretics by G.K. Chesterton:
Somebody complained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, "That may be true; but you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong." The strong humour of the remark ought not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense; no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error. In similar style, I hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and wrong.
dovetailing
11mo ago
How much should I care about being-opaque-to-casual-inspection level "opsec", given that I don't really care about actually being unidentifiable?
So I have this username on TheMotte. I have another that I use elsewhere. The other one is extremely easy to connect to my real life identity, to the point that I treat it like posting under my real name. I don't have the sort of spicy opinions that would make me a serious target for cancellation, but there's some stuff I've posted here that would probably have some social repercussions if people IRL knew that I'd written it. This is largely why I picked a fresh username here in the first place.
I'm under no illusions that it's impossible to get [dovetailing] -> [real identity] with some sleuthing. (I'm curious how hard it is, but there's no way it's even close to impossible.) What I'm a bit more concerned about is getting from a casual search of [real identity] to [dovetailing]. This has led me to divide up my posts across various places, and not cross-post links here to things I've written elsewhere, or share the same writing in multiple places. However, it strikes me that this may be an incorrect amount of paranoia -- not nearly enough to hinder the [dovetailing] -> [real identity] pathway for a serious inquirer, but more than makes sense if all I care about is someone I know personally, or a (potential) employer, casually searching my real name or my other username and getting my posts here.
So... what do you all think?
dovetailing
7mo 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
7mo 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
1yr ago
Isn't it the case that a lot of the legacy youth orgs have, whatever their past reputation, themselves been drifting left over time? The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in particular are no longer considered safe by a lot of more conservative religious people (and it's not just about allowing gay scouts) and several more explicitly conservative Christian (Protestant, of course...) versions are, at least judging from some families I know, gaining in popularity because of this.
dovetailing
7mo ago
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.
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.
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