This specific interaction with you seems to happen every time I comment about trans stuff. I'm not sure what to do about it as I was trying to be more cautious this time.
The first comment was sincere confusion. The second comment was genuinely trying to point out an alternative explanation for their observations (the two situations look very similar to the receiver) and see if they wanted to reflect and talk about the topic more (apparently not).
Blanket statements are almost always wrong, and assigning a blanket statement to your opponent's belief-state is especially fraught. That's what OP is doing by saying 'many of my opponents believe that the difference is 100% nothing other than patriarchy brainwashing,' a type of extreme and simplistic sentiment that very few people actually believe and that it's dangerous to casually assign to them.
I don't know if I just have to accept their premise because they're making a claim about their lived experience, that seems bad for debate. Or if I'm again just being asked to use more words to rule out specific types of hostile intent, which I was trying to do more of in my comments on this particular thread but failed to apply to this individual sentence. I can try to leave zero sentences under-caveated, it's just very tiring.
guesswho
3yr ago
Fair enough, I'm not qualified to comment on anything outside the US and could have caveated as much. This is definitely an update on my knowledge about how this is handled more globally.
This action by the government does seem silly to me but maybe the cultural context in Canada is different.
I'm wondering if you're mistaken in your belief, and if having this possibility pointed out to you might cause you to reflect on it and re-evaluate.
The point is that these two situations (hearing someone talk about the influence of patriarchy who believes it is one piece of the causal network vs hearing someone talk about the influence of the patriarchy who believes it is the only casual factor in existence) are very similar to the listener and very easy to confuse with each other, especially if one of them happens to fit with a narrative you're already familiar with.
Very few people actually hold beliefs of the type 'this entire gigantic complex social phenomenon is 100% the result of sinister conspiratorial brainwashing across every country it appears in and has zero other causal factors affecting it'.
People are dumb, but few are that dumb.
It's much more common to believe your opponents believe something like that, than for them to actually believe it.
But it sounds like maybe I'm not allowed to question your lived experiences or whatever, regardless of the type of claim you're making about other people, so, ok.
guesswho
3yr ago
I mean, the rationalist community, or the programming community, or similar, have a ton more trans women than trans men, and a ton more men than women. How does one square this with the claim that trans women have the biological / psychological inclinations that women do?
Well, that one is because al three are highly correlated with mild autism.
(if anyone is unsure: this is not a joke, this is my actual answer, I'm a bit paranoid about being misconstrued)
Beyond that: I don't make the claim, and I don't think that most progressives would try to defend the claim, that the population average and variance for trans women is exactly the same as the population average and variance for cis women on every possible psychological and sociological axis. T
This isn't prohibitive; obviously, most individual members of most groups will not personally be at the precise population average for most traits. And there are lots of subgroups you could make, like 'women who play sports' or 'asian women in the US' or 'women who write fanfic' or etc. that will have slightly different population averages for all kinds of things, but still be women.
Basically, no one ever said trans women aren't weird women, just that they are women. (that statement being a normative prescriptive statement arguing in favor of certain semantic and cultural lines, rather than an empirical claim, since empirical observations can't on their own make a semantic definition 'correct').
But also, note that trans people don't just get socialization as boys or as girls or as men or as women; they also get socialization as trans people. As a political football in a high-contact era of political sportsmanship, they're naturally pushed towards having to be a lot more involved in the culture wars and political rhetoric just to defend their own interests and stay on top of what is about to happen to them next. I think this makes them more common than would otherwise be the case in all types of highly-online politically-themed communities, rationalists being one of those.
guesswho
3yr ago
I believe they are referring to 'two-spirit', an idea that I haven't seen any actual members of the LGBT community bring up unprompted in at least 10 years (outside of adversarially-chosen social media screencaps), and something that I've never seen added to the LGBT+ acronym by anyone other than opponents.
guesswho
3yr ago
Children are still considered to be innocent of sexual knowledge,
As always: if 'gay people exist' is considered 'sexual knowledge', then so is 'straight people exist', and children are not innocent of this knowledge because they know what 'a mommy and a daddy' are.
guesswho
3yr ago
Two questions that immediately occur to me:
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Why should we care that this non-governmental organization is going to change what it calls some birds, what authority does it have to change what anyone else calls them and will it actually have any effect, and
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Given standard linguistic drift, how long does the average bird name tend to last, anyway?
guesswho
3yr ago
But renaming a bird that may be called, say, "Smith's Wren"? Why?
As far as I can tell, it's that instead of saying 'these specific names are offensive for these specific reasons' and getting into a fight over each one, they're just implementing a rule of 'no naming birds after specific people' and calling it a day.
In a sense, this is good: it means that even if the rule was invented for partisan reasons, it can't be enforced in a partisan manner in the future.
guesswho
3yr ago
I wonder if you've actually met a lot of progressives who believe that, or if you've met a lot of progressives who were responding to people who claim is it purely genetic by claiming that culture also plays a role.
Anyway.
Propensity to violence is a very atomic personality trait that, of the type that genetics is known to affect.
'Participation in STEM fields' is a hugely contingent and complex social behavior that has nothing to do with our evolutionary environment. There are certainly genetic factors that contribute to it under a given cultural regime, but it can't be a simple and direct relationship because it's not even a fact about the person themself, it's a fact about the interaction between the person and their society.
guesswho
3yr ago
Well, the particular legal definitions used in the UK and Scotland have nothing to do with how progressives are thinking about these categories in the first place?
And I think most would probably say that legal definition is backwards and should be changed, if you asked them.
More broadly: I think the miscommunication here is that you're approaching it as 'what one test is disqualifying', whereas they are approaching it as 'what holistic cluster of traits and behaviors is qualifying'.
Because man/woman are very highly defined and explored categories, there are lots and lots of important things you can do to fit into one, such that a few individual noncentral divergences are ok.
Whereas 'nonbinary' is not an established category with tons of established and agreed upon signifiers, thus holistic-strength-of-fit is always comparatively weak and ephemeral, thus it's a lot easier to get disqualified for divergences.
guesswho
3yr ago
To sum up: I don't understand why a "non-binary" gender identity is contingent, but a "trans woman" gender identity is axiomatic and unquestionable.
Oh, sorry, I thought that was clear: It's because we're currently engaged in a number of legal battles over the rights and status of binary trans people along many different axes, so the actual considered discussion of such topics is drowned out by political activists on both sides circling the wagons and offering extremist rhetoric to push their side of the ballot onto voters.
Yes, that's annoying, but it's approximately what always happens when any issue is being used as a wedge in elections and coming before legislatures.
Beneath that, and especially in offline spaces where real people are talking to real people, there's much more measured standards that consider all the stuff you're talking about in a holistic way. Although, with the caution that a lot of people are at the start of their transition process or have to stay closeted at work or at church or etc., and these are valid excuses for not already always ticking all the boxes.
guesswho
3yr ago
So, basically every trait has both both a hereditary component and an environmental component. These are not at all exclusive.
guesswho
3yr ago
Train a few people to operate them as a swarm (like a school of tuna) and they will be very hard to take out.
I don't know what the effective range on pepper spray is, but is this something that can be defeated with a pair of safety goggles, a respirator, and a broom?
guesswho
3yr ago
I don't see what that's supposed to have to do with the question at hand, can you explain?
It seems like an answer to an entirely different question, and one that most all corners of progressive space would agree with.
guesswho
3yr ago
I mean, lesbian rape with a strapon is not super common and I'm guessing is even less likely to lead to conviction than other types of sexual assault.
But it doesn't make the assailant not a woman, and I don't really see how the artificial nature of the phallus is relevant to the metaphysics of the situation.
guesswho
3yr ago
You get in trouble saying something isn't a 'real' category, but absolutely they're qualitatively different 'types' of categories, and it's much more possible to 'fail' at being nonbinary than at being binary trans (so long as you are making some efforts along the established binary transition pipeline).
guesswho
3yr ago
Well, I think the real answer there gets down to what type of what evidence defines category membership in the mind of the speaker.
'Population-level violent crime arrest rates' may indeed be a thing that varies with gender, but it's not the primary thing that we are talking about when we talk about gender identity. Things like gender presentation (clothes, hair, makeup, etc), legal classification, the types of secondary sex characteristics affected by medical transition, etc. are much more central to how people who acknowledge trans people as members of their identified gender are thinking about gender membership.
If the non-binary mansplainer is not diverging from male patterns at all on those axes, or not enough to show a genuine effort/belief/essence, then it makes sense for someone who is using those axes to do their classification to be reluctant to classify them as not-male.
guesswho
3yr ago
Depends on the theory and what you mean by 'contradict'.
For theories about simple systems with a small number of axioms and moving parts, where the predictions of a model are very binary and precise, yes, it's easy to heavily contradict a theory. Put two spheres of a certain mass a certain distance form each other in an endless void, and your theory of gravity will very precisely state how quickly they should move towards each other; observe anything other than that, and with a complete absence of plausible alternative explanations for the observation, you've got a very strong update against your theory.
But in much more complex systems with millions of moving parts and interacting effects, such as a person or a society or an economy or etc., models tend to make much broader and more stochastic predictions, and there tend to be lots more plausible explanations for divergences from those predictions. And thus the updates from both affirming and 'contradictory' evidence tend to be much weaker, and more symmetric.
Of course, that's why a lot of people tend to get frustrated about studies of complex systems, and call that all 'soft science' and sneer at it. but this always seems like a type of cowardice to me; yes, studying those systems is a lot more difficult, but that doesn't mean that truths don't exist or can't ever be found, and they are often very very very important!
guesswho
3yr ago
I do think that binary and non-binary trans are inherently different things, though.
Like, 'man' and 'woman' are legal categories with real effects, and they are coherent permanent social categories which include a lot of variance while retaining their core identity. It's entirely possible for a man to wear makeup or for a woman to mansplain, they will be unusual in that one regard but can still be unarguably a member of their larger category based on everything else about them (including their legal classification). There's also an established path to binary transition covering things like hormone therapy, changing your legal status, standard types of presentation changes, voice therapy, etc.
Whereas being nonbinary is not really a well-defined social or legal category in the same way. Saying you're nonbinary is not so much a declaration of 'I am in that stable well-understood category you already know about, as it is a declaration of intent to exhibit behaviors and presentations that don't match either of the established categories. There's no established path and no checkboxes to show that you're 'doing it right'.
In that sense, it sort of is possible to 'fail' at being nonbinary, in a way that's a lot less possible with binary trans (assuming you're making an effort at the established path). Someone can look at your self-invented steps and methods and say 'You really are not anywhere outside of the established binary, or even near the periphery.'
Of course, they don't have any authority to stop you and their judgement is not inherently more valid than yours, or w/e. But such judgement are abstractly more coherent, at least.
guesswho
3yr ago
So there's a difference here between being 'not really' X, and being an unrepresentative example of X.
I think most people are not really aware of this difference on a level where they could talk about it coherently.
But it's very very often true that, when some member of a group has been shown in the public eye to be bad, with an implication that this demonstrates how members of that group are bad generally or how this group is bad for society, that this individual has been adversarially chosen and is in fact not representative of their group.
Think about brutal and criminal police held up as examples of ACAB and justifications for Defund. It would be entirely sensible to argue that these are not representative examples and don't justify the level of hostility towards the larger group that they are being used to engender.
Of course, with police, defenders don't have the option of claiming they're not 'real' police, because there is a central authoritative agency which objectively determines that fact (eg, they have a badge).
But in cases where there is no such objective metric and claims of being 'not a real X' are in fact possible and sensible, it's not surprising to me that people fall into this rhetoric when trying to express the intuition that this attempt to tar a group with a bad individual is unfair and dishonest.
It's not good rhetoric, but most people have no training in rhetoric and are bad at it; you will always be able to find examples of someone saying something stupid online.
My point is I think it's a bad attempt at conveying a good and true logical point about what is happening. And it's worth engaging with the point instead of the rhetoric where possible.
Well, for example, you could look at adult differences in people who socially transitioned at age 6 and went on puberty blockers at age 11, versus people who did no transitioning of any kind before age 20.
You could also look more broadly at statistics from the 1970s and 1980s when transitioning was a weird thing that an underground community of adults only could barely imagine and get access to, vs today when it happens much younger and easier and is more accepted, and see if that has changed the correlations across the population overall.
Of course, we're talking about small sample sizes with fundamentally unlike populations at that point, which makes it hard to trust the statistics (for example, I don't trust your statistics on crime for basically this reason; aside from the sample size, I don't trust that what happens to trans people in 1973 Sweden has anything much to do with what happens in 2023 US, the context is too different).
But there is a big difference between a theory being unfalsifiable, and a theory being hard to gather good data about. A lot of theories about quantum mechanics are very very hard to gather data about, but are also very good and useful theories.
There's the danger that bad actors will design theories that are deliberately hard to gather evidence against, of course, but you can ussually discover and dismiss bad actors for other infractions.
Also, I'd just like to note that, in a sense, the broadest plausible interpretation of your claim is on its face absurd, and therefore the claim probably needs to be more narrowly specified before we can fruitfully talk about it:
self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity.
Things like wearing dresses or using makeup or referring to yourself with a specific pronoun or voting Democrat or etc. are all behaviors, which we would expect to correlate with trans identification (let me know if you dispute that).
Saying 'I am trans' is a behavior, and correlates very highly with trans identification. So obviously trans people don't behave like their natal sex across all behaviors.
Crime and mansplaining may or may not correlate with trans identification in the same way, but it's not a neutral inference to act as though those are the type of behaviors that determine the truth of your broad claim. Determining which behaviors do or don't correlate with trans identification, and how we should feel about those facts once we agree on them, is pretty much the entire field of the debate on this topic.
I'll also note, in a divergence from the progressive rhetoric, that I think binary and nonbinary trans are qualitatively different concepts that shouldn't really be used to make inferences about each other. I see nonbinary trans more as a cultural movement, the way we had 'androgynous' celebrities and fashion in the 80s corresponding to attempts to loosen and alter gender norms more broadly. Whereas binary trans is much more 'society has two options, I'm that one.
guesswho
3yr ago
Are there examples of other fatal collisions with different narratives arising?
I would just generally assume that sports media require the goodwill of teams and players to do their job, and if those groups want to see this as a freak accident and don't want the survivor to be subject to a witch hunt, that's how most of the media is going to play it.
Certainly I think you see things like that in many other forms of access journalism, form politics to finance to gaming to etc.
But I could be wrong, I don't follow sports reporting closely.
guesswho
3yr ago
I think the answer would be something like 'during that time you moved from being one of the people doing well to being one of the people doing poorly, but the total number of people doing well is the same/higher'.
Which of course gets to the fundamental issue with all standard economic indicators being aggregate snapshots in time that don't tell you much about individual's life trajectories and experiences.
If you are using a scope on a rifle that you happen to know if biased slightly to the right, it's not 'curious' that all of your attempts to correct for it involve aiming further left rather than trying to correct in both directions.
You can argue that under-representation doesn't exist or isn't important or isn't what's actually secretly motivating these things, if any of those happen to be your beliefs.
But, your opponents on this topic have a clearly stated and compact narrative that fully explains their observed actions, it's not 'curious' and it's worth engaging with it at the object-level.
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