sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This archive of the comment in question was linked in the "The Motte Is Dead, Long Live The Motte" thread.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts".
But people in academic fields like sociology or gender studies who use terms like "Cultural Marxism" or "Conflict Theory" tend to talk as if he did, or as if he formalized it somehow. Presumably because of a tendency towards a narrative where sociology is an advancing discipline of people building on prior ideas, coupled with Marxism having high status in academia (especially at the time) so people wanted to portray their own work as a descendant of it. Here's the second Google result if you search "conflict theory":
Conflict theory states that tensions and conflicts arise when resources, status, and power are unevenly distributed between groups in society and that these conflicts become the engine for social change. In this context, power can be understood as control of material resources and accumulated wealth, control of politics and the institutions that make up society, and one's social status relative to others (determined not just by class but by race, gender, sexuality, culture, and religion, among other things).
Conflict theory originated in the work of Karl Marx, who focused on the causes and consequences of class conflict between the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production and the capitalists) and the proletariat (the working class and the poor). Focusing on the economic, social, and political implications of the rise of capitalism in Europe, Marx theorized that this system, premised on the existence of a powerful minority class (the bourgeoisie) and an oppressed majority class (the proletariat), created class conflict because the interests of the two were at odds, and resources were unjustly distributed among them.
And then, the narrative goes, others built on Marx's insight by extending this idea to other groups:
Many social theorists have built on Marx's conflict theory to bolster it, grow it, and refine it over the years. Explaining why Marx's theory of revolution did not manifest in his lifetime, Italian scholar and activist Antonio Gramsci argued that the power of ideology was stronger than Marx had realized and that more work needed to be done to overcome cultural hegemony, or rule through common sense. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, critical theorists who were part of The Frankfurt School, focused their work on how the rise of mass culture--mass produced art, music, and media--contributed to the maintenance of cultural hegemony. More recently, C. Wright Mills drew on conflict theory to describe the rise of a tiny "power elite" composed of military, economic, and political figures who have ruled America from the mid-twentieth century.
Many others have drawn on conflict theory to develop other types of theory within the social sciences, including feminist theory, critical race theory, postmodern and postcolonial theory, queer theory, post-structural theory, and theories of globalization and world systems. So, while initially conflict theory described class conflicts specifically, it has lent itself over the years to studies of how other kinds of conflicts, like those premised on race, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, and nationality, among others, are a part of contemporary social structures, and how they affect our lives.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Instead I’d make the simple assumption in this particular case that those Latvians who support this decision are clearly unhappy with the direction their national history took in the past, and ask the question what sort of past they’d have preferred to have.
This assumption is wrong, their desire to destroy the obelisk does not imply an opinion on alternative-history scenarios. They aren't thinking about alternate-history in the first place, let alone working off the same specific points of divergence and assumptions about plausibility as you. They're expressing the sentiment "Soviets were bad!", and while you might not think it's reasonable to destroy the monument on that basis, it's strawmanning to represent this as choosing between alternative-histories. Like the sort of thing Scott talked about in this post:
In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.
Others have pointed out that other points of historical divergence are possible, but here's a different kind of divergence relevant to their sentiments: what if the Soviet leadership was made up of moral and competent people? What if rather than brutally suppressing dissent and killing lots of people with various deeply misguided policies, they were a bunch of George Washingtons with more viable political/economic views and more interest in setting up a stable well-functioning system rather than personally hanging onto power? We could debate how plausible it would be for people like that to have taken power in the Russian revolution, but I don't think it's a less valid thing to consider than different war results. And it's closer to the actual way people judge the morality of others.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The post you're referring to might be "Does Class-Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?".
I'm skeptical though. It seems like the place that the modern SJW memeplex got going was internet communities like Livejournal/Tumblr/Something Awful and various fan communities, there's not a lot of career advancement happening there. (And being on the internet there's not even a lot of awareness of how wealthy anyone is, except insofar as it is displayed by behavior.) There might be advantages to be found in some early takeovers like academia and sci-fi writers, but in plenty of the proto-SJW communities like within activist circles the beneficial move was to not bother with the community in the first place. It was only later that it got enough power over influential institutions for there to be real benefits. You can say something like "it's incentivized by status-seeking/tearing down leaders/tribalist instincts that people are prone to because it helped obtain resources over evolutionary history" but at that point the connection between the behavior and the benefit is getting pretty tenuous.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The obvious response is that this guy is voicing an unusual/contrarian view among people who vocally complain about left-wing internet censorship, most of whom believe that internet companies getting to control what political views/information people are allowed to express is bad in general.
The more complicated response is that there is a false-dichotomy between SJWs and a subset of right-wingers as the relevant comparison. Traditional mainstream right-wingers don't even tend to be particularly vocal about left-wing censorship except for when they're censored personally, and there's a bunch of Republican congressmen who were shadowbanned on Twitter but have still never mentioned the issue. Youtube censored a mainstream pharmaceutical company at the behest of a NYT journalist because it was being used as a counterargument to an attack on Trump, and I don't think Trump mentioned it once. This is of course a dichotomy that SJWs very aggressively foster themselves, and anyone sufficiently loudly opposing SJWs tends to be tarred as "far right" and kicked out of any left-wing institutions (and lots of neutral institutions, and plenty of right-wing institutions). But the fact that mainstream right-wing institutions seem more prone to believing SJW claims and caving to SJW demands than anti-SJWs (including anti-SJWs who may qualify as left-wing or moderate in their general political views) seems like an illustration of why this isn't the actual axis. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently called for the censorship of Kiwifarms, does that mean "both sides" are pro-censorship or that the line doesn't really run from SJWs to MTG? And once you're considering the SJW/anti-SJW axis, remember that anti-SJW communities like /r/tumblrinaction (now banned by Reddit) are the ones who popularized "horseshoe theory" to describe how they considered SJWs the other side of the coin from groups like the Moral Majority.
For example the Gamergate surveys showed GG to have strongly left-wing demographics - but who would you trust to not fire you if a media campaign was screaming about how you were a racist, a group of Republican activists or a group of Gamergators? And this combination of views is pretty common with anti-SJWs, including the most common views seen in surveys of TheMotte itself. SJWs would of course say that pro-GG people are right-wing regardless of their votes for Obama or views on gay-marriage/abortion/government-spending, but you can't have it both ways. Either the anti-SJW and pro-free-speech people are right-wing, in which case it seems like the contingent of right-wingers most vocal on the issue are pro-free-speech. Or they're left-wing/moderate/oldschool liberals/etc., in which case this isn't about "the liberal left" vs. authoritarian right-wingers.
Now, once you get into political alliances and self-identification this gets more complicated. Undoubtably there are an increasing number of people who consider themselves "right-wing" precicely because they oppose one or more SJW doctrines or behaviors. This is understandable, since SJWs have rapidly progressed from co-opting groups like the Something Awful forums to co-opting groups like mainstream political parties. Lots of those people are going to place more trust on right-wing sources and be sympathetic to whatever they consider the right-wing position on any issue they don't have another reason to care about. And of course few actual politicians care about free-speech, or many of the issues relevant to the SJW/anti-SJW axis, so when SJWs do something unpopular enough that it shifts votes to Republicans the politicians aren't going to be perfectly responsive to their new voters. There have been a couple attempts at some sort of bill modifying Section 230 to get sufficiently-large internet companies to not arbitarily censor their political opponents, but they haven't gone anywhere. Politicians seem not to regard it as very important, unlike those in the trenches of social media, though that might eventually shift after enough big incidents like the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Politics is chaotic and it's hard to guess how things will go. But it's not uncommon for relatively small groups of invested people to end up dictating policy, and in regards to internet censorship those most invested in the issue seem to be those sincere in their opposition.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Mostly the posts are about the censorship aspect of the story, which is naturally going to attract comments by people who oppose censorship on principle and/or have specific examples they object to. Even people who support censorship tend not to be as passionate about censoring COVID-19 stuff as they are about something like "hate speech", so it's not going to get a bunch of comments about not "tolerating the intolerant" or whatever.
In any case your post comes across as obnoxious bulverism, seemingly taking for granted that disagreement with your position is driven by irrational fear or "Mass Formation Psychosis". You don't even really explain what your position is (No lockdowns whatsoever? Lesser lockdowns? Lockdowns until 3 weeks after vaccines were available to all and not a day longer? Lockdowns implemented voluntarily by non-governmental organizations but not any by the government? Government campaigns against social distancing so it doesn't drag on due to voluntary behavior? Better-targeted lockdowns that don't do useless things like restrict borders after it is already spreading domestically?) let alone explain why you have that position. Are there views you don't agree with but also think are a normal mistake rather than psychosis? Is this about specific views or are you postulating a bias towards pro-lockdown views without necessarily asserting they are actually incorrect? Your post doesn't make any of this clear, it doesn't have much content at all, it just points to a thread with people expressing views closer to your own and postulates that this shows people are getting over the madness that made them disagree with you.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
On imageboards "meme X" has connotations similar to "gimmicky", "not serious", or focusing on shallow viral (and often comedic) appeal. For example Goat Simulator is a famous meme game. It is often insulting, but not always, though it is more likely to be insulting when applied to something that is not obviously a meme. Neko-Arc in the fighting game Melty Blood is universally understood as a meme character whether you like her or not, she has bizarre gameplay elements, is a chibi catgirl, and one of her moves can result in covering the screen with a Twitch overlay while she shows up in front as a streamer, covering up important parts of the screen like the health bars. The Bongcloud is a meme chess opening. Ron Paul was a meme presidential candidate, as were Kayne West, Deez Nuts and Trump, but Trump ended up proving he was more than just a meme. Of course while Trump wasn't a meme candidate in 2020 anymore, he was still a meme president. Anarcho-capitalism and Maoism Third Worldism are meme ideologies.
Some years back, calling things a meme in the above sense as a (often not entirely serious) insult was particularly popular on imageboards. Calling women the "meme gender" was a meme that arose around then. The thread that a screencap was already posted of seems to have been the origin, there were a couple "meme gender" comments before that but they didn't get attention. If you read the replies it looks like someone thought of the more serious "women are more likely to follow social trends" interpretation even then. But the primary meaning is more saying that women are too much of a gimmick, like how it would get old if you made a fighting game with only two characters and one of them was Neko-Arc.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
By the above 4chan usage many of them would call it a meme ideology, yes. It has the distinctive unseriousness of having never held power and thus never having to make compromises with reality. It is generally justified based on a set of principles that are too strict to fail gracefully if they run into problems and that are major contributors to its appeal as abstract ideas. Some of those ideas have bizarre and meme-worthy implications, as seen in the anarcho-capitalism memes that tend to focus on the Non Aggression Principle. E.g. "My NAP-bot detects the neighbor's voluntarily-contracted child slave has stepped 0.4 inches past my property line onto my flower bed, responds to his aggression by dousing him in McNapalm." The McNuke meme actually predates its modern incarnation by decades, as a child I remember reading Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned from 1985, and that's a story generally considered sympathetic to anarcho-capitalism. Or the general idea that it deeply matters whether a system of social organization is classified as a government or not. I remember anarcho-captitalists on the internet talking a lot about boycotts and refusal to provide service as an alternative to government, as something that would limit pollution for example. Experience with real-world examples of that sort of thing, like social media companies, payment processors, and even banks cracking down on those expressing the wrong opinions, paints a less idealized picture and has probably played a role in making such rhetoric less popular. By analogy Goat Simulator owed its popularity to a few strong ideas, but those ideas didn't have the depth and staying power to remain entertaining under closer and longer inspection, and it had bugs that were often funny in the abstract or the first time but not if you had to deal with them all the time
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
had enough reach that those victims received threats from other people
But the threats don't have to have anything to do with the reach. Everything Alex Jones said about Sandy Hook came long after it was mainstream in conspiracy theory circles. The idea that those involved were actors didn't catch on because of Jones. It caught on because of that one Robbie Parker video from the day after the shooting where he comes across as suspicious, which has been incessently posted on /pol/ since it came out and supplemented with various additional coincidences. 4plebs doesn't go all the way back to the shooting but you can see the discussion back in December 2013:
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/robbie%20parker/order/asc/page/1/
Meanwhile Alex Jones was claiming that the shooting happened but was a false-flag orchestated by the government. If we go by this Media Matters page he didn't start parroting the "actors" thing until 2014. It's hard to judge since obviously I obviously don't watch him myself but it doesn't even look like he talked about it much, the grassroots conspiracy-theorist interest was much greater. But nonetheless the legal system blames him for other conspiracy theorists because they share the same beliefs, without proving that he caused those beliefs.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
brought them to vast new audiences
Did he? How many people watch Alex Jones but aren't familiar enough with the conspiracy-theory community to have encountered an extremely popular conspiracy theory? And of course the grassroots conspiracy theorists had a lot more detail and arguments too, unlike Alex Jones vaguely referencing the claims that were already widespread. For that matter the first page of that 4plebs search in 2013 has a screenshot of Robbie Parker's former phone number, certainly not something Alex Jones shared and from before he even started referencing "actors". We hardly need Alex Jones to explain why he got harassing phone calls. Even if there's a significant audience of casual conspiracy-theorists who watch Alex Jones but aren't in contact with the rest of the conspiracy theory community, it seems like those would be the least likely to act on that information.
From what I can tell the modern conspiracy-theorist community is fundamentally very grassroots, a distributed effort to accumulate the sort of seemingly-convincing evidence and arguments described in The Pyramid and the Garden. Not that non-conspiracy-theorists are immune to this, most of them will accept similarly bad evidence under other circumstances, they're usually just using heuristics like "reject things called conspiracy theories by mainstream sources" which fail as soon as something true is called a conspiracy theory or a false conspiracy theory is treated seriously by the mainstream. E.g. I remember people on 4chan sometimes thinking posts they didn't like were "bots" even when this was technologically very implausible, and then years later I saw the habit of accusing opposing posters of being "Russian bots" on sites like Twitter and Reddit go mainstream. (Complete with popular ideas like "You can tell they're Russian bots because their usernames end with 8 numbers on Twitter" - of course the actual reason is because that's Twitter's format for suggested usernames.) Anyway, maybe the conspiracy-theorist community used to be more centralized but nowadays very few conspiracy theories originate or are even popularized by some identifiable leader, they're just networks of people who combine the same mistakes in reasoning most people make with a distrust of official sources.
a group that is harder to bring to court for defamation for reasons that should be obvious
Right. But it doesn't seem like you should get to legally treat the guy who happens to be the most prominent conspiracy-theorist as a scapegoat just because there's nobody else to sue. Defamation law doesn't have a mechanism to crack down on communities of people with mistaken ideas, and rightly so.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
especially with some examples I've seen posted on twitter, where the art is almost identical to some of the stuff it was trained on
The examples you have seen are almost certainly someone using img2img and then it being spread around with the source image as if the resemblance is spontaneous. Several cases like that have been going viral among the anti-AI-art people recently.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This one was posted with the prompt, so someone on 4chan generated 250 images with the same prompt and didn't get the same pose once, as well as supposedly putting each of them through SauceNAO without it finding sufficiently similar images. Of course most aren't posted with the prompt at all.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Now the lethality is only in humanized-lung mice not primates and the sample size for this particular part of the test was only 10, so 80% = 8/10.
Note that these mice are much more vulnerable to COVID than humans, in the same study 100% of the mice infected with wild-type COVID died. It would presumably still be a worse variant than anything going around now, but not 80% fatality levels of worse.
Since SARS-CoV-2 causes fatal infection in K18- hACE2 mice3, we leveraged this situation to compare the animal survival after viral infection. In agreement with the results of body-weight loss and clinical score, WT and Omi-S caused mortality rates of 100% (6/6) and 80% (8/10), respectively. In contrast, all animals infected with Omicron survived (Fig. 3c).
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
In the same way that parapsychology serves as a control-group for science, I think identities like otherkin, transracialism, and systems/plurals/headmates function as a control-group for gender identity. The results don't look good: otherkin used the same framework and seemed to genuinely believe they were experiencing things like feelings of dysphoria at not having their true identities as animals (or sometimes celestial bodies or fictional characters) be accepted. Plurals are a social-justice reimagining of Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder, a condition now heavily discredited and typically considered the product of social contagion from therapists themselves or media portrayals. (Something the plural community doesn't appreciate.) Moreover the number of people identifying as plurals seems much greater than the ones who identified as having MPD during its heyday, presumably thanks to the idea attaching itself to social-justice ideology and spreading through internet communities. People will attest to psychological experiences as extreme as "being multiple people" because of a bit of social influence, but we're to believe vaguer supposed feelings of "gender identity" aren't subject to the same phenomenon?
Like a scientist running 20 tests and reporting one of them positive at P<0.05, we should take notice that there were a whole bunch of communities for special social-justice-related identities and "non-binary" is one of the few that happened to pass the test of getting acknowledgment from mainstream institutions. Even the non-binary concept itself has been noticeably optimized, like how there used to be much more of an emphasis on neopronouns and the terrible "misgendering" of not being called "em" or whatever. Despite being acknowledged as legitimate by a decent fraction of the social-justice community, otherkin still got mocked enough even on websites like Tumblr that they adopted a set of "secret" tags for their posts so it was harder to find them by searching "otherkin", while non-binary identities ended up performing better socially. Non-binary identity also ended up getting much more mainstream acknowledgement than those other identities, presumably because they fit more easily into the same framework of "gender affirmation". Unsurprisingly it is nonbinary identities that have exploded among the young to the point of being mainstream rather than niche internet communities or obscure diagnoses (especially among groups like college students, particularly students at elite colleges).
This brings us to another use for control groups. Binary transgender identification has also exploded among youths/minors (to a lesser degree). If 3.48% of 2021 college students identify as some form of non-binary/genderqueer/agender despite all or most of them not experiencing anything besides a social phenomenon, it seems likely the same phenomenon would be influencing binary transgender identification as well (which has a higher likelihood of spurring medical intervention). I don't know if the correct way to model this is some sort of hard "truscum vs. transtrender" division, the whole model of "gender identity" being wrong, and/or something else. But the combination of rapidly changing statistics (including/especially in communities where transgender people were already so accepted that traditional "closeted" narratives don't work well), seeing how it spreads through peer-groups or various communities like speedrunning, and seeing how the sausage of social/institutional recognition gets made has made me extremely skeptical.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex.
Using "gender" to refer to this instead of "gender roles" or "gender stereotypes" conflates it with the idea of "gender identity". The idea of "gender identity" claims that people have some inherent deeply-rooted "true" gender separate from both their bodies and what societal roles they fulfill or stereotypes they match. This then comes with a whole set of ideas about "misgendering", about "deadnaming" if the non-binary identification accompanied a request for a name change, etc.
Note that actually basing it off gender roles would be completely different, for one because it would be based on society rather than the individual. Nobody advocates calling every woman in the military "he" even though the job is a male gender role. Similarly someone might believe in stereotypical correlations such that he's surprised to see a female programmer of a white NBA player, but that doesn't mean he thinks those people are actually becoming male or black, not even partially.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I am discussing only #1, which is true by the definition of "gender"
Well, not really. In standard usage it is a synonym for "sex".
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=gender
The "male-or-female sex" sense of the word is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for "sex of a human being," in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963. Gender-bender is from 1977, popularized from 1980, with reference to pop star David Bowie.
Most people are not engaging in feminist academic writing, and so they usually do not imitate their confusing use of "gender". Everything from conversations with normal people to news articles to government/corporate forms will use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably. Meanwhile the "identify as" definition is sufficiently new that it isn't even mentioned. Needless to say, people are not obliged to use that one either, especially since it is typically used to smuggle in the contested assumption that people have an internal feeling of "gender identity".
It that they identify as male.
Then how does that follow from defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex"? Under this definition is it meaningful to say things like "Andriy falsely identifies as a man, since by fleeing Ukraine as a woman rather than staying she is refusing her society's able-bodied male gender role of staying in case she is needed to fight and die against Russia"? Or does it mean that gender self-identification is true by definition, in which case it is not a reflection of society's gender roles but of the "gender identity" definition?
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Do you think that asexuals exist? That is, people who do not feel sexual attraction at all?
Over what timeframe? If we take the definition at face value, 100% of the population either is or used to be asexual as children. There are also various things that can cause a low or nonexistent sex drive, such as hormone levels, particularly in women who usually start with a lower sex drive to begin with. Wikipedia claims that 10% of all pre-menopausal women in the United States are affected by Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, though the source is just an executive at AMAG Pharmaceuticals in an article about the FDA approving their libido-boosting drug, so I don't know what research this is based on. (For instance, I don't know if that's 10% being affected at any one time or if it's 10% who are substantially affected at least once in their lives.)
But of course "asexual" has implications beyond that: it is formulated in analogy to sexual orientation to imply an inborn, permanent, and immutable state. (Originally "asexual" was used in psychiatry to indicate women who have difficulty orgasming during sex, with recommended treatments ranging from psychoanalysis to having the woman be on top, but this has been displaced by the lay meaning which uses it in analogy to "homosexual".) But that's not actually a good model of how libido works, as seen by the tendency for people who identify as asexual to either stop identifying as asexual or to adopt some "grey-asexual" identity that allows them to continue identifying as asexual while having sex. To venture beyond anecdotal evidence, the only study I've found on the subject is The Temporal Stability of Lack of Sexual Attraction across Young Adulthood. Of the 25 people aged 18-26 in Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health who selected "No sexual attraction", only 3 of them selected that option again in Wave IV 6 years later.
So if people with low or no sexual desire are put in an ideological environment where they are encouraged to identify this as "being asexual", the vast majority of those are going to end up happening to have more sexual desire at some later point, whether due to changing hormone levels over time, the right circumstance to get in the mood, etc. (An even greater majority if we count children, and I've seen a noticeable number of 13-15 year olds identify as asexual on Tumblr or have their supposed asexuality uncritically mentioned in news articles, despite a large fraction of the population being enough of a late-bloomer to not be interested in sex at that point.) Even if they don't do so on their own, the ideological framework discourages treating it as a medical issue (even though it is a symptom which can reflect deeper medical problems needing investigation) or taking something like the aforementioned libido-boosting drug to help you have a romantic relationship or enjoy a sex life (which I'm assuming would be termed "conversion therapy"). Nothing about the framework is designed to better understand the world, but to fit people into categories extrapolated from popular identity-politics categories.
So then that brings us to "demisexuality". As many people will attest, especially women, romantic interest and emotional involvement often enhance sexual interest. A lot of men will say "my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world" and mean it. Established relationships also have more opportunities for romantic situations to get in the mood, casual physical contact to arouse interest, or actual sexual interactions that one partner becomes interested in before the end (the aforementioned HSDD Wikipedia article terms the last one "responsive desire"). Even with porn women are more interested in mediums like writing that tend to build up more of an emotional context for sex. It is thus unsurprising that if someone has a libido low enough to not feel noticeable sexual desire, something that boosts sexual desire like an emotional relationship could make the sexual desire noticeable. But, like asexuality, there is no reason to think the implications of calling this "demisexuality" in analogy to sexual orientation are accurate.
The point is that "gender" meaning "gender identity" and "gender" meaning "gender roles" are different and incompatible definitions, and applying them to individual cases gives very different results. Under a gender-role definition of gender (which approximately nobody actually uses except in a motte-and-bailey fashion) Andriy is not a man due to defying the strict gender-role currently mandated by Ukrainian society with unmanly flight. Under a gender-identity definition of gender Andriy would be a man based purely on self-identification, even if the only difference from a stereotypical woman is a Twitter bio saying "he/him". Whatever definition is used it cannot coherently be both, and so "non-binary gender identity" is not meaningfully based on defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex".
Nevertheless, when pro-trans people use the terms, they mean them in the senses I have described.
The "difference between gender and sex" argument has actually fallen out of favor in trans-activist circles in recent years. It's now fairly common to see explicit arguments that trans people are whatever sex they identify as. But even before it was never really used consistently. For instance various governments have implemented plans to be more inclusive of non-binary people by letting people choose "SEX: X" on their driver's licenses, and apparently nobody involved in this process takes the opportunity to make it say "GENDER:" or even notices the distinction.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I don't understand what you mean. Gender is not used to mean gender identity. They are distinct concepts.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender
"Those seeking state driver's licenses in Massachusetts are closer to being able to designate their gender as "X" instead of "male" or "female." The state Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would allow for the nonbinary designation on licenses."
— Steve LeBlanc
"Facebook's message was clear when the social media network added new gender options for users on Thursday: the company is sensitive to a wide spectrum of gender identity and wants users to feel accommodated no matter where they see themselves on that spectrum."
— Katy Steinmetz
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/male
b: having a gender identity that is the opposite of female
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/female
b : having a gender identity that is the opposite of male
Merriam-Webster changed those and similar entries in 2019.
Many people use the terms “gender” and “sex” interchangeably. However, gender and sex actually refer to two separate things. Gender is an identity — your personal sense of who you are. The term can also refer to socially constructed categories that relate to what it means to be a man or a woman.
BBC Three: Gender is what you feel, not what parts you have
The truth is that gender is in the brain and physical sex is a completely seperate and different thing.
There is of course also use of the "gender role" definition, though such use is rarely consistent. Rather, as I have been saying, definitions vary according to the needs of the argument or situation at hand.
If you have actual evidence that trans-activists now generally believe that the terms "sex" and "gender" mean the same thing, I would be interested in seeing it (note that I said "generally", not one nut job.
This is newer, less mainstream, and even less coherent than defining gender as gender identity, it's me commenting on what anecdotally seems like a growing tendency in pro-trans arguments rather than something mainstream enough to be in Merriam-Webster. I said that it had become fairly common on social media to see arguments basing sex on gender identity as an illustration of what seems like a broader move away from the "gender and sex are two different things" argument, which at least still treated biological sex as a legitimate concept. (Probably because of those adopting the trans-activist "gender vs. sex" distinction in order to argue that things like sports should be based on sex. Some of which already have regulations or laws which happen to use the word "sex".) Most don't explicitly make that argument, they just use "gender" and "sex" interchangeably the same way normal people do while basing both on "gender identity". But some do make it explicit, and for them often the structure of the argument is something like 'sex is a social construct/complicated (argued in a way that equates those with 'meaningless', the same way 'gender is a social construct' was used) and therefore 'sex' is either best defined based on gender identity or abandoned entirely".
Deanna Adkins, director of the Duke University Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care:
From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.
The idea that science can make definitive conclusions about a person’s sex or gender is fundamentally flawed.
Forbes: The Myth Of Biological Sex
Or the controversy a little while ago about a fictional Warhammer 40,000 sourcebook mentioning biological sex:
Goonhammer: Transphobic Language and the Horus Heresy
“The hormonal and biological make-up of the human male” sounds innocuous if you are not aware of the process that’s going on to alienate people from their trans friends, family, co-workers and neighbours. If you do not know enough about this miserable “debate” to know the words used to imply hate rather than state it outright. To someone who does, this sentence is viciously coded.
Let’s get the science out of the way: There is no specific hormonal or biological make-up of a human male. Sex is basically a pair of giant buckets of characteristics we lump people into. There is no single specific indicator of sex, there are hundreds, and almost every human who has ever existed is a jumbled mix of them.
An Open Letter to Games Workshop
Today we wish to address the accidental (we are to assume good faith) use of Gender Critical* language in the Horus Heresy Age of Darkness Rulebook, but there is no reason that such checks shouldn’t extend to further minority subjects such as race, ethnicity, and disability in your mainline products.
This is a letter imploring you, Games Workshop – in order to better protect members of your community – to employ or consult sensitivity readers for subjects that mirror the lived experiences of your hobbyists, but extend beyond the lived experiences of your writers.**
However this is unfortunately phrased in a way that is uncannily and uncomfortably close to the rhetoric used by Gender Critical and trans-exclusionary groups. You need only skim tabloid press for examples of the terms “biological male” being used in malice, and open the comment sections for the people who use them to justify hate.
This is not anything as coherent as trans-activists all switching to a new definition, and some of those explicitly say sex is biological to the extent that they recognize it as a legitimate concept at all. Rather it's that the previous "gender vs. sex" redefinition left a loophole in that people could still say "sex" if they knew and cared about the redefinition, so now doing so is associated with the enemy and there is an effort against it employing various arguments/redefinitions/accusations-of-transphobia.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The point reiterated across the conversation is that there is strategic equivocation between the "gender identity" and "gender roles" definitions of gender used by trans-activists. (Both in what definitions is explicitly stated and what definitions are implicit in how they use the word.) I have no idea how you think that point is contradicted by them sometimes saying one of the two definitions being equivocated. What it does contradict is your claim that "Gender is not used to mean gender identity."
she is saying that gender identity is the determinant of what sexual organs doctors should give to patients who are transgender or who were given surgery as infants because they had both types of primary sexual characteristics.
No, the classification of which sex someone is by gender identity is regardless of having had surgery or any other traits besides gender identity.
It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female. Gender identity does and should control when there is a need to classify an individual as a particular sex.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Again, she seems to me to be clearly talking purely in the context of deciding whether or not to perform gender-reassignment surgery.
It is an expert declaration to a court regarding H.B. 2, the North Carolina "bathroom bill" which prohibited municipal governments from mandating that organizations segregate their bathrooms according to gender identity, and further required schools and government facilities segregate them according to physical sex. It is not about gender-reassignment surgery. It is about categorizing which sex someone is for the purpose of segregating bathroom usage by sex, and argues that according to medical science the only valid determinant of someone's sex is gender identity.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I think the reason the logic of this article seems so strained is probably that there's a segment of the conspiracy-theorist community which has latched onto "transhumanism" as a buzzword and have a distorted idea of what it is. This allows them to equate stuff like "X once gave money to some sort of group with ties to self-described transhumanists" with stuff like "X wants to inject you with a chip to control your brain". Search 4plebs for transhumanism to see some examples, or conspiracy-theory sites like Transhumanism.news. The author seems to have picked up some of those ideas about transhumanism.
they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense
Except it's not "whatever you say" - transracialism is largely taboo and otherkin had more success but still failed to become a mainstream part of social justice ideology. Rather there is a whole ideological framework for how people not only can but should transition if they "are transgender". Then there is a social environment in the social justice community (and often among professionals in trans healthcare) with a heavy bias towards encouraging people to think they're transgender at any supposed sign and then "affirming" those who think they are. Like Scott's old post about conceptual superweapons that talks about medical testing, except that was supposed to be an analogy.
The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
But if one side has a superweapon, it's impossible to argue for the other. If the threshold starts at forty, and one doctor says "But we can't be the sorts of monsters who would refuse a potential cancer patient live-saving surgery!", and this argument is a deeply-ingrained part of medical culture and the other doctors don't want to be tarred as cancer-sympathizers, then the threshold goes to 30. Then another doctor brings up the same argument, and the threshold goes to 20. Soon the threshold is at zero and they're referring rashes and hay fever for surgery and no one can protest because they don't want to look Pro-Cancer.
Part of allowing only one side of the argument might be that you sometimes see arguments like "Even if you're worried you aren't 'really transgender' (and if you're wondering you almost certainly are!) there's no harm in having the body you want.", ignoring the serious and lifelong negative effects. But this isn't part of any broader commitment to transhumanism. If anything the mandate towards affirmation of "legitimate" identities means things tends to get squeezed into a dichotomy, where something like transracialism must be not just "weird" and "probably a bad idea" but problematic and racist. Because if it wasn't there would be pressure to apply the same sort of logic used for "misgendering".
Finally, remember the main emphasis of transhumanism is not on people satisfying arbitrary preferences about their bodies to begin with, it's on making people better. Transhumanist fiction might have the occasional person who decides to be downloaded into an octopus body or something, but that's an irrelevant sideshow compared to intelligence-enhancement and immortality, especially outside the realm of fiction where real-life transhumanists are less concerned with imagining exotic visuals than authors are. Needless to say, the social justice community is often intensely hostile to such improvements, being more concerned with the idea that improvements to longevity or intelligence might be used by the rich than with the enormous benefits they would bring. They are also very hostile to anything that can be interpreted as "eugenics", which a lot of the easier transhumanist technologies could be classified as. Unlike the general public they are sometimes even hostile to the idea of curing disabilities and with the idea that being disabled is indeed objectively worse for reasons beside society's "ableism". Those deaf parents who deliberately choose to have deaf children (to be part of the deaf community) through embryo selection might use similar technologies to transhumanists, but doing so is pretty much the polar opposite of transhumanism.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Why didn't you link an archive of the thread in question? The first commenter, sliders1234, specifically says "Critiqueing your other post". He just came across another post on the same Substack and was more interested in responding to it than the one actually linked. The second post by stiffly is clearly responding to that line because he saw it quoted in sliders1234's post. Maybe he didn't actually read your post and thought the quote in the other reply was from the linked post, maybe he knew it was from another post but wanted to respond to it anyway. Neither are mining TheMotte for content, just responding to another post on the same Substack and then to another reply in the same thread. Among repliers more will read the other replies than read the linked article, so it's not weird that stiffly would end up replying to something quoted by sliders1234. And looking at the linked archives of their comment histories neither seem like bots to me.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric
“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”
Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.
I suppose if the hospital's "Gender Pathways Service" is already prescribing puberty blockers so freely that there's no requirement for diagnosis beyond the child or child's parent getting a referral by saying something about transgenderism to the family doctor, giving them before the first appointment saves time. While doing so based on 0 appointments is obviously unusual, quite a few of the anecdotes I've heard mention prescriptions after the 1st appointment. The way you describe it used to be much more standard, I remember trans-activists complaining about previous requirements like living for 6-months to a year as the opposite gender, but doesn't seem common anymore.
It's possible they justify this with the argument that puberty blockers are much less significant than opposite-sex hormones and are just "giving the child time to choose" or some such thing, but that seems heavily contradicted by the evidence. For one it amounts to much the same decision: 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans. For another puberty blockers themselves, particularly when used to avert puberty entirely rather than delay precocious-puberty a couple years, are serious business. We know about them impacting bone density based on the use with precocious-puberty, but we also have reason to believe they impact brain development but have zero research on what that impact is in humans. The best I've found is this study on sheep. A concern mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
Given how the medical system is normally so obsessed with the precautionary principle (like the FDA shutting down early unapproved COVID testing) it seems crazy that something as significant as preventing puberty entirely has become standard practice based on no more than the same drugs previously being approved to delay precocious puberty. There's a severe lack of research on even the safety/side-effects of using those drugs that way, let alone a randomized control trial of effectiveness indicating it actually performs better as a treatment of trans-identifying children than doing nothing.
In year 3 of women dominating the awards I remember there was an article bragging about it:
The Verge: Women swept the Hugo Awards — again
Unsurprisingly, I haven't seen a similar article for the 3 subsequent years. Here is a comment I made about it at the time.
As that comment mentions, in 2013 submissions to Tor UK around 78% of science fiction authors, 67% of "Historical/epic/high-fantasy" authors, and 43% of "Urban fantasy/paranormal romance" authors were male. So the difference between the last 6 years of Hugo nominees/winners and the demographics of the field are even more dramatic. Though it's possible the demographics of the field itself has shifted dramatically since then, especially given the various anecdotal reports of overt discrimination in the publishing industry. (I don't know how much the increased viability of self-publishing might ameliorate this.) But I suspect that if there was a way to get more recent data (does somewhere like Amazon/Goodreads have enough scrapable demographic data on authors?) men would still be writing the majority of the science fiction.
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