rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
1mo ago
Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.
He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity.
I don’t think AGP males are a product of modernity - the only thing that’s new is ability to transition using hormones and surgery, and to do it openly without it being instant social and professional suicide (not that there are no social costs now, but it’s completely different to say, the 1950s).
Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).
A trans identity that’s truly the product of modernity would be the autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind (both trans masculine and trans feminine). A 50 year old masculine married man with children who transitions after years of hiding his crossdressing habit from his wife, is not the same as teen for whom transitioning is an escape from the social and physiological pressures of their biological sex. Body dysmorphia, sensory issues, discomfort with heterosexual norms, etc. would be the primary motivations - maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.
It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man. The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.
rae
1mo ago
What do you have against waiters and waitresses? It’s not scrubbing dishes but it’s still an honest working class job, you’re on your feet all day, managing the rush of busy service, you have unpredictable shifts at inconvenient hours, you have to deal with potentially angry customers who blame you when things go wrong and dealing with the general public in a service job can be hella draining.
Imo waiters deserve more respect than bullshit corporate prestige jobs and I feel like you’re doing waiters a major disservice by using their job as a shorthand for “attractive girl whose primary goal is not making money but finding a husband.”
Ah so waitress is a stand in for a “hot girl job”? I’m a frequent restaurant goer and across Europe that’s not really been the case. First off I’ve found most waiters to be male, although at family run restaurants you might have the wife bringing you the food while the husband cooks, and in that case the vibe is definitely more “motherly” than flirty. I’m guessing it’s different in the US which might be one of the causes of the scissor statement.
“Rich men prefer to marry rich women who got wealthy through their looks and personality rather than from grinding the corporate ladder” is a very different statement from “rich men prefer to marry attractive poor women in low status jobs rather than rich women”. Picking a supermodel over a CEO is not the same as picking a bartender over a CEO.
rae
1mo ago
How is Lauren Sanchez Bezos closer to a waitress than a girlboss? Prior to meeting Bezos she already was a D list celebrity as a news anchor/TV presenter, and is a helicopter pilot that founded an aerial videography company (literally… a girlboss). She was also almost 50 with 3 kids from a previous marriage when they met. The overlap between her and a waitress (especially a 50 year old waitress) is… what?
rae
1mo ago
I would imagine that if I spent a lot of time in trans spaces, I would far more frequently seeing people complain about being "misgendered" or "clocked" or failing to pass than I would see the opposite (in which people celebrate how successfully they pass).
I have a decent number of trans friends and that’s not the case at all. Occasionally a funny story around passing is shared, but most of the time nobody really brings up the topic. The trans issues that come up often are problems related to healthcare (e.g. finding a good endocrinologist), or family members not accepting them. Not getting called “miss” instead of “sir” (or vice versa) when ordering takeaway.
rae
1mo ago
This is probably occasionally the case, but this has happened when I’m wearing a hoodie, jeans and trainers from the men’s section, no makeup, and generally put 0 effort in presenting as anything, with people from demographics that are not known for their LGBT friendliness (e.g. middle aged Eastern European men). And it doesn’t explain why a security guard or a passerby would make a big scene trying to redirect me to the other bathroom.
But in any case, this doesn’t mesh with the GC worldview. Either the average person is very trans friendly, or trans people can pass and be perceived as the opposite sex.
rae
1mo ago
As a trans person, none of the GC talking points actually matter in my daily life and it can actually be more disruptive for me to use the spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms) of my biological sex due to my appearance.
My experience is that the average person is absolutely not a sommelier when it comes to differentiating cis from even moderately passing trans people. If you look enough like a woman, you’ll get called ma’am by service workers and you’ll get weird looks if you try to use the men’s public bathroom (or even have the toilet attendant run after you to tell you you’re using the wrong bathroom). I’ve even had people be very surprised to learn that one of my friends was trans after interacting with them all day.
rae
2mo ago
The Greenland Crisis dominates the headlines in Europe and Canada and could lead to a huge political and economic shock, but I barely see any discussion about it here as opposed to what’s happening in Minnesota.
Is it just not covered in US media? With just 8% of Americans agreeing with the administration’s annexation plan (not too far from the Lizardman Constant), it doesn’t fit into the standard culture war issues perhaps - it’s not a scissor statement like the ICE shooting video, and there’s no real opportunity to have a morality debate due to expansionism being so out of the Overton window in the west.
rae
3mo ago
Many of the problems with modern dating aren’t specific to dating, they’re common to every type of social relations.
The loneliness epidemic is getting worse and worse and if a huge chunk of modern men can barely make a single real life friend, what are the odds they can find a girlfriend?
None of the gender war arguments explain why same-sex friendships are more difficult nowadays. But all the reasons that explain the loneliness crisis - social media addiction, an increasingly individualistic culture thanks to technology, the breakdown of communal third spaces, the fact that everyone is moving away instead of staying in the same town all their life, etc. all explain why people could be struggling to find a romantic partner.
Or a very simple explanation: the poorer, the less technologically advanced you are, the more socialising becomes a necessity. If you’re in a poor rural village, you need to socialise with your neighbours because they’re the ones that will help you if you get sick, fall on hard times, or just need an extra hand to help around the house/the farm. You need to get married and have children, not only because of social pressure but because family is both a safety net and a labour pool.
The loneliness crisis didn’t happen overnight. As we got more technologically advanced, we needed to rely less and less on other people for survival and even entertainment. People bring up how people in the past complained about every technological invention ruining the fabric of society as an argument on how social media/smartphones/AI isn’t that bad, but the past complaints were essentially right.
Books made it so you could stay home and be entertained without talking to anyone, although you had to be literate and still go out to the shop to buy them. Daily newspapers meant you didn’t have to get your gossip around the dinner table or at the pub. Television meant you didn’t have to leave the house to see a movie or a show. Smartphones let you have all of the above, and let you talk anywhere with anyone at anytime on your own schedule, replacing frequent in person hangouts where you could actually bond, with group chats and shallower, asynchronous text conversations.
AI is taking it a step further and making it even worse. Do you really think that the vast majority of people, who are now currently addicted to social media and scrolling TikTok all day instead of going out to make friends and romantic connections, will somehow be able to resist the slurry of AI generated content tailored precisely to engage them? LLMs designed to be the perfect conversation partner, the perfect friend, the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend, accessible 24/7 as a gorgeous realistic avatar that fulfils all your fantasies?
rae
3mo ago
The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.
You can imagine a sci-fi scenario where your brain is transplanted into a female body. You’d still be you. Exposure to oestrogen would change your personality to an extent, but it wouldn’t be instantaneous, and it would be a lot more limited than if you had been exposed to it in the womb or during childhood.
Now of course brain transplants are currently purely theoretical but cross-sex hormone therapy isn’t. Cis men who have taken oestrogen (more common in the past to treat testicular or prostate cancer) report higher incidences of depression, anxiety, body image issues from feminisation, loss of libido and sexual dysfunction, and emotional volatility.
Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.
rae
3mo ago
All the occupations required to work on game dev, or media, are overwhelmingly liberal or progressive. Even software engineers are only 16-27% conservative. They might not be on board with some of the woke extremes - same way not every conservative is an ethno-nationalist - but they’ll still support LGBT rights, and diversity initiatives. I would think that conservative software engineers are less likely to work in game development as well - why not work at Anduril where you get paid more and you don’t have to hide your political views?
Richard Hanania’s article on Why is Everything Liberal still applies. There’s no talent pool to make “non-woke” games. Plus, I never got the feeling that the market actually penalised wokeness at any point - my impression was that wokeness was used to shield mediocre work of criticism, or to excuse its underperformance.
rae
3mo ago
I had the same experience as @charlesf whenever I was in Spain or talking to Latin Americans. Most people seemed happy to hear me attempt to have a basic conversation in Spanish and were very patient and helpful with vocabulary, except for Catalonians who however lit up with joy when I said a few words in Catalan and then promptly overestimated my ability to understand their language.
rae
3mo ago
Right-wing/MAGA ideology makes a mockery of objective fact. Reactionaries divide us with their culture wars. They try to force us to ignore the objective truths of systemic injustice and climate science.
Either you abhor and reject that which is objectionable, or you end up in recursively epistemic quicksand spew. It has to be possible to reject outright the false lies of the far-right.
If your entire post can be flipped to support the other side by just swapping a few key words, are you actually saying anything?
rae
3mo ago
I did pick an outdated or possibly wrong map for that statistic, but the point still stands: immigration like you described does not seem to correlate with TFR.
If you look at the countries with the lowest number of foreign born residents in the EU, i.e. Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, they have TFRs of 1.31, 1.57, 1.71, 1.6, 1.50, they are not doing any better the ones with the highest amount of immigration.
Ukraine's TFR was already very low before the war, you can't blame the recent rapid Russian "immigration" for that.
rae
3mo ago
This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.
Countries like South Korea and Japan have had far less immigration than the US and most of Europe, yet their TFR is even lower. Romania has ~97% native born population with the small number of immigrants mostly labourers from Moldova who speak the same language, and yet, the lowest fertility rate in Europe.
rae
3mo ago
If the government bans condoms and the pill, watch that number go down even further. People didn't have porn and video games back when TFR was high and birth control illegal.
Not sure where you're getting the "married to the state" idea from. Where I live, women aged 16-24 are out-earning men and the majority of NEETs are men, and 10x less likely to be raising children compared to their female counterparts. If you're suggesting cutting welfare to parents - the main source of welfare women are getting more than men, AFAIK - that seems to be the opposite of a pro-natal policy.
Plus, if you look at stats, fertility rate and income generally follows a U shape where the poorest people on welfare have more children than the middle-class, and are generally less likely to be married as well, so not sure what you'd be accomplishing there.
Promote the family as the pension system.
How is this supposed to work? Older middle class and upper people have private pension funds and own homes that have appreciated to multiples of their initial values. Poor people will struggle to help their parents, making raising children even more difficult and unaffordable.
The average parent spends a total of ~$200k per child here. In the absence of a state pension, it would be more rational to add that money to your retirement fund than to hope your child will be generous enough to give you a monthly stipend in your old age.
rae
3mo ago
If a communist dictatorship couldn't enforce the policy, what chances does a liberal western democracy have? The War on Condoms will be even less effective than the War on Drugs.
rae
3mo ago
I don't think low birth rates can be fixed through policy. If you look at historical or current pro-natalist policies, how many of them have succeeded? Norway has excellent compensation for parents, but the birthrate is still falling. Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway. Wealthy women bribed doctors while poorer women had risky illegal abortions, and many children were abandoned in orphanages.
I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional. Either religious groups with high fertility rate take over (although even the Muslim world is having declining birth rates) or technological advances make the whole problem go away. If you automate the vast majority of human labour, then nearly your entire population is non-productive dependents whether they're young and able bodied, or old and infirm.
rae
3mo ago
C++ now has smart pointers and one you get the hang of them, you don't want to go back to the old way of managing memory manually. It's not about the language being intrinsically "safe" or "unsafe", but rather that it enables you to automate memory management and you don't have to think about it unless you absolutely need to. You can just have a small "just trust me bro" section instead of having the cognitive load of having to double check the entire codebase.
rae
3mo ago
I think the article fails to bring up the most important factor: journalism, screenwriting and academia are all incredibly oversaturated and the number of people wanting to go into those fields massively outstrips the demand, and on top of that, the first two are rapidly shrinking fields, while academia is producing more new grads than ever competing for the same few spots. The old GenX/Boomers at the top are obviously going to want to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie, and let's not kid ourselves, merit was never the primary consideration when it came to hiring writers before either.
rae
3mo ago
I don’t think the main reason for Hollywood’s decline is bad movies, but rather the fact that it now has to compete with streaming, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
What’s the point of going out of your way to the cinema when already you have more movies than you could ever watch available at home, and whatever’s playing in theatres will be available online in 4K HDR whatever in a few weeks anyway?
rae
3mo ago
Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.
You can't claim to be a HBD understander and then confuse ethnicity and religion, then merge together hundreds of different ethnic groups in single categories. C'mon, bringing up Islam in that way is literally contradicting yourself. Bosnian Muslims, Iranians, Senegalese people and Indonesians are all Muslim and all have completely different genetic backgrounds. And it's not like there's a sharp distinction between "White" and "Middle-Eastern". People from the Levant can be whiter than many Southern Europeans.
Or if you talk about Jews, again, that's not a single ethnicity. Israel is a melting pot of Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, etc, while the majority of Palestinians are Jews that converted to Islam centuries ago.
The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.
If you actually believed in HBD, you would be pro-immigration of Igbo, Iranians and Brahmins elites, who have lower crime rates, higher educational achievement and financial success than White Americans.
rae
3mo ago
Is religion really getting an upswing? Every statistic I've seen suggests a huge drop in the number of practicing religious people in most developed nations in the last decade. There seems to be a small number of right-wing young men going back to church, but it's not large enough to counteract the overall decrease in religiosity, which is especially pronounced in women and people left of centre. I've personally seen more an increase in a sort of generic spirituality than organised religion.
It’s not about either preference being more optimal, or consciously valuing the 10 year old self more than the present self. It’s about sexuality being this uncontrollable compulsion that’s suddenly injected in your brain, and in people like Duncan (and I, before I transitioned), it doesn’t feel like it’s “you” that likes or wants sex.
Like I’m absolutely fine with my preferences shifting across time, discovering new hobbies, becoming a mature adult with a mortgage and a pension fund. But in my case, a preference for sex didn’t feel like I tried something new, liked it, and consciously decided to keep doing it. It felt like there was an alien invader in my brain that I had to pacify so I could get back to doing the things I actually liked. I didn’t actually want sex in the way that my biology was pushing me to want it. It felt like losing control over who I was, in the same way someone might suffer from binge eating when stressed - a completely different experience from being a foodie who occasionally overeats when they go to a very good restaurant.
Most people don’t seem to have trouble integrating their sexuality into their selves. They see their sexual preferences as “theirs”. Maybe something about being autistic can lead to your sense of self crystallise too early and prevents you from tolerating changes, or maybe it causes a mental separation between the self and “base” desires, I don’t know.
But at the end of the day, my happiness and quality of life is enhanced when I take medication that lets me feel like my sexuality is on my own terms.
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