urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
this sexualized MTF social contagion disproportionately affects men for whom both the HSTS and AGP pitches have meaningful appeal
The technical term for this cluster is “sissy.” Don’t look this up unless you’re looking for NSFW content.
This kind of man exists in very high numbers, they just aren’t open about it. Go on Grindr and you’ll find that there’s no shortage of “discrete” tops who love twinks and femboys, and not enough supply to meet the demand.
The general complaint among the, uh, supply is that the demand is high, but extremely low-quality, even by gay hookup culture standards of quality, precisely because the demand is from people who are principally heterosexual, and probably have deep roots in heterosexual culture -- including, possibly, a wife. Therefore they're exceptionally flaky/indifferent/uncertain, leading to the kind of debasement I discussed in my other reply to you as a desperate attempt to lock-down any reasonably qualified leads. So I'm not sure this is a lopsided market in the way you're suggesting; it's more of a matching market where neither side seems to be happy. Cf all other dating environments.
However, by far the most common kind of pairing you find for this type of person is actually femme-to-femme, both because the masculine options are so low-quality, and because some meaningful fraction of this group is bisexual or AGP. In our earlier discussion on this topic, I was talking about this sub-population; when you assumed I was talking about transmasc-transfemme pairings, I was actually confused! When you said that transitioning "is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women," well, that wasn't surprising or confusing at all to me, and it was interesting to see that it was confusing to you.
IMO, trans women who try to date men are, for obvious reasons, often pulling from the pool Blanchard described as "gynandromorphophiles", which are often also AGP. Gender transitioning, for this pool of individuals, is often both appealing in the AGP sense, and appealing in the sense that it gives them "skin in the game" that establishes cred among bisexual trans women who treat cis men with suspicion.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo 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.
I'm curious, what would your typologies of trans people look like, if you were to describe the different categories you've seen?
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).
One thing that I often like to note is that the Blanchard typology misses an important detail, which is that "men who find the idea of being a woman erotic" isn't exclusively a thing for men attracted to women; it's in fact extremely common among men attracted to men. So the idea of lust for women being misdirected into self-lust for the state of being a woman has never struck me as an exhaustive explanation for the crossdresser-to-trans pipeline, or even the primary one.
I think there's a mode that's almost something akin to vagina-envy, where the default attraction for most men is to women, and therefore attaining womanhood is a means of becoming the archetypal appeal to the male gaze. I've certainly known people who've seemed to fit that bill.
That said, I don't know that the general public would find this cluster more sympathetic than the AGPs -- there are often a lot of immensely sexist assumptions baked into their idea of what attaining womanhood to appeal to the male gaze would look like. You know, "I exist to serve men, my body is a means of satisfaction for men," often combined with an intense desire to appeal to bisexual or bicurious men by insisting on their willingness to debase themselves for men in ways cis women will not. What exactly that debasement might entail is left as an exercise for the reader.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
others had always been nerds (e.g. one had also been a NASA mission control specialist)
Man, the word "control" there really changes the significance of this sentence.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
Most girls besides online too much feminists want some male glaze.
Hm. Intentional or typo?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
Yeah, in the US with the presidential system the main election people care about is the presidential electors; legislative elections take a back-seat and typically win by riding coattails in straight-party voting. In parliamentary systems I presume “which party did you vote for?” would be the more significant question. Something like “how do you feel about gay marriage?” feels less intrusive to me, I could see that coming up in a reasonable conversation. The entire point of the voting question is specifically to interrogate polling booth behavior, not political values (which is why I find it so offensive — I’ve voted for Andy Griffith, my mother, Walter White, and Rishi Sunak for various local elections, my political values don’t fit into a party).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
Unfortunately lots of people are convinced that the country is falling actively into dictatorship and the question is roughly like asking if you’re a collaborator in occupied France. That’s where people’s heads are at.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I will often go on record defending the good name of men from criticism, but I think men are generally more commitment-phobic than women. That is all it takes to convince women that men are commitment-phobic, because they’re comparing them to themselves and not to a hypothetical ideal.
For market reasons, a lot of men become attached to women they consider less than their ideal, and likewise for market reasons said women try to lock down the higher-than-expected man who’s Just Not That Into Her. Men also have a hard time with a commitment to monogamy, because they see it as a lot to promise (and a lot to expect from) one lady in particular.
It’s relatively common for women to end up in long term relationships with guys they’d wish would move more quickly. Actually if your partner never wishes to move more quickly than you as a man, that’s a red flag that She’s Not That Into You.
It’s just a pretty clear fact to me that, as a population, women move more clearly towards commitment and men just don’t, setting aside if he’s madly in love with her, then all bets are off.
That said, I also am often disappointed that the perspective I bring about what it’s like to be a man is often unacknowledged by women in internet discussions, but that just is what it is. Women in my personal life are occasionally able to have a real discussion about gender roles and experiences, and I learn more from that anyway.
How a woman regards your perspective on gender roles as a man is highly dependent upon how she perceives you, and men who comment critically on them on the internet start with a negative perception score which takes a lot to undo, because it’s perceived as being essentially sour grapes. “If he were actually a decent man,” they imagine, “he wouldn’t have so much to complain about.” To be fair, a ton of men complaining about dating on the internet is sour grapes and turns nasty pretty quickly.
But it’s still disappointing when I try hard to understand the perspective of women and state my concerns in a way that concedes ground and establishes good will, and then receive negativity or nothing in return. I think a positive way forward has to begin with mutual understanding and patience, but it’s often my impression that women aren’t willing to understand or have patience for men they consider low-status — and, after all, high-status men don’t need mutual understanding and patience, they already have status.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
I’ve also had a similar experience. I believe the “who did you vote for?” question is the updated progressive’s version of trying to intelligently discover your values; they believe it’s the question that you can’t dodge without revealing you’re a Trump supporter. They earnestly believe “I did not vote” is code for “I voted for Trump and I’m trying to hide it,” which explains the nasty reaction, particularly with how you tried to explain it.
That said, I’ve often wondered what would happen if you said something like “I don’t vote because there is no ethical political participation under capitalism, I work in my community to create change using syndicalist methods, and I reject the fascist-capitalist method of false representative democracy,” and whether said progressive girl would give a similar kind of disgust face, or look on you with awe. I wouldn’t lie to someone to sleep with them, but the temptation to lie to troll someone is real.
Ultimately, when someone asks this question, you’ve already lost. I think if someone is that neurotic about political persuasion, it’s unlikely they’d be a stable person to befriend anyway. There’s a long tradition of progressive women going, “I’ve been seeing this guy for months and he’s so nice and we have fun together, but I found out yesterday he voted for Trump, should I murder him or just break up with him?” They consider it tantamount to an undisclosed felony conviction, and acknowledge no legitimate or strategic reasons why someone might have voted for him. They believe voting for him is an endorsement of his personal behavior and misconduct, like anyone who voted for Trump is liable to start grabbing random women by the pussy at any moment. To them, it’s better to reject anyone who doesn’t clearly endorse the Democratic Party, because they believe Republican men are out to assault them. TDS is strong.
Someone who thinks like that seems like an awful friend and a worse partner. So I’d say she did you a favor.
I don’t really understand your point, or what you’re trying to say. I care about and love the women in my life a great deal. I empathize seriously with the experiences of victims of sexual abuse, and in fact I find their stories hard to encounter because I feel such anger and outrage at the loss of self-possession and immense sense of shame and guilt that survivors struggle to overcome. It’s evil, plain and simple.
The reason it’s not a subject of debate is just what you said last: there’s no toxoplasmosa. It was a horrible crime and the guilty were sentenced.
You seem, at least to me, to be trying to argue from this case that heterosexual love is impossible, or that heterosexuality is inherently corrupting. Well, actually, you said “male sexuality.” That’s interesting.
Your profile hasn’t seen any posts in two years, and in one of the final posts before this valentine’s post you wrote this:
I bring these examples up not to harangue men but to explicitly set aside the discourse about romantic relationships, in which most men and women seem happy to accept a certain asymmetry. A male friend recently gave me the dating advice that what's important in a partner is that they are "naturally happy", which struck me as a hilariously insufficient and condescending criterion, better suited to choosing a puppy. As a spergy gay man, I don't have a dog in this fight, if it is a fight, but I do find explicit commentary on the expectations of gendered social interaction helpful (and entertaining).
Do you believe that love between gay men is possible? Is lesbian love possible?
Both, as I’m sure you know, have cultures of asymmetry and opposites, of masc tops and femme bottoms and dalliances with much older, wealthier men and daddy kinks, of butch lesbians and lipstick lesbians. Is gay love fairer than straight love to you?
Asymmetry coexists with mutual desire all the time, and with every orientation. And so, of course, does abuse and sexual assault. Love exists in spite of the evil of this world, and indeed sexual tenderness exists in concert with the impulses of male sexuality.
Most men are driven by a desire not only to please themselves through sex but to please their partners as well. I don’t doubt that, as a gay man, you are highly familiar with gay men who would rather give head than receive it; you should understand that the desire to please your sex partner exists among straight men as well. Most men highly enjoy sex noises and dirty talk from their partners, as a sign of that dirty phrase, “enthusiastic consent”, and of mutual pleasure. There could be no jokes about women faking orgasms if men did not find the idea of women faking orgasms to be Ego-destroying. Men overwhelmingly find the idea of sex with an unconscious person unarousing, in addition to morally unconscionable.
I guess I wonder what drives you to believe that male sexuality is inherently corrupting, instead of merely a force that can be used for good as well as bad — obviously, in this case, for bad. Have you ever fallen in love with someone, and wanted more than anything their happiness? Have you ever desired sex with someone out of a desire for unity with them, to make them feel good, to be as close with them as physically and emotionally possible? These are all compatible with the intensity of raw, undifferentiated male desire, and if you might allow me to say, far more erotic than mere lust.
My understanding is that this comes under fire by the GC people Edit: I meant strict self-ID people because it means that passing is actually highly relevant to how you're treated, and a combination of late transition/no money for treatments/lack of self confidence/depression makes that seem like an oppressive obstacle. I get their point but I guess it's always been obvious to me that in the real world passing is eminently important, and the reality is that everyone's identity (on every axis) is a negotiation between them and society. My attitude's always been: I'm fine using your preferred pronouns if that makes you feel better, but can you please make an attempt to help me out?
I wouldn't say this is quite accurate. I'm technically in the zoomer bucket, and can't remember 9/11, but I absolutely remember a time with more optimism than we have now. Perhaps it's just that I grew up in a conservative part of the US, but the George W. Bush hate especially after Iraq just wasn't really present in my childhood. He was kind of buffonish sometimes, but obviously all my evangelical Republican family members loved him. I remember being impacted by the great recession, but I was young enough that it didn't seem to matter very much. The idea of patriotism was just real, people believed in it.
And even as I grew older, Obama's election was a moment of massive optimism on the left and center, a black guy named "Osama" "Obama" was elected president of the United States.
The smartphone (and before that the iPod) were actually a big part of the optimism of the time. We remember these changes as negative, but people were massively excited about them at the time in a way they just aren't for technological changes today.
I place the turning point USA around the time that the Black Lives Matter movement started, that's where the left abandoned the narrative of Obama being the signpost of full racial integration and brotherhood. The modern culture war can be traced back to that, IMO. Feminism and gamergate and that kind of stuff were fellow travelers, but around that time that stuff was just a few weird girls on Tumblr and hadn't hit the mainstream yet. I guess in some sense it never did, I can't imagine the left legitimately scrawling "KILL ALL MEN" in all caps like an Umbridge punishment the way the Tumblrinas used to do.
where harsh truths conflict with what their elders told them the world should be
I guess in some ways this was true, particularly as we look at prices for major expenses. But I'll say that my elders are just as flabbergasted at cost disease in healthcare and ballooning house prices as any young person. My parents are shocked at how much the family home is worth, and my mom is kind of a YIMBY.
But the big thing I think that's changed is just social trust. My dad was a hippie back in the day, and hasn't gotten a raise as an associate professor in a decade; he's no evangelist for institutional loyalty. My mom is, but she trusts everyone, so that's just her personality.
I actually think the boomers have a good counterpoint when they say that young people just aren't willing to do low-tier work and consider a hard day's labor beneath them. I think that's true. I think about the kinds of things my dad put up with before he got hired as a professor -- 12 hour days, cleaning buildings in the middle of the night, saving all week to buy a movie ticket as his weekly entertainment. I'm pretty sure zoomers would call that a human rights abuse. But many, many boomers did things like that.
If there's one thing where I feel resentment about the scripts I was handed not fitting reality, it's that the depictions of flirting and romance in popular media were almost calculatedly misleading about how you actually develop a relationship with a woman. Lots of friends-to-lovers arcs and will-they-or-won't-they nonsense. That makes for good TV. But real relationships usually require some level of approach and some kind of status display, even if we're polite and we don't call it that.
I think a lot of our intimacy crises kind of go back to that, we never taught young men how to flirt and young women how to intelligently discern flirting from offense, and hence we're in a place where lots of young people don't know how the fundamental human mating ritual is supposed to work and either fear it or smash through it like a bull in a China shop. I guess we assumed it's instinctual -- it isn't. Turns out our prefrontal cortexes were actually a load-bearing part of human reproduction after all.
If culture as a whole doesn't teach this, that's how you end up with the PUA subculture and redpill bros doing it. They're winning the social game among young men because they actually give actionable information about how to achieve an intimate relation with a woman. The honest truth is that it's not so different to court a woman passionately as it is to seduce her, at least in terms of the feelings of attraction and interest you have to create in her for it to happen.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
There's absolutely a lot of Christian- or ex-Christian people who will recall the Song of the Cebu, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, or the Hairbrush Song.
I think listing iconic VeggieTales songs without reference to the Cheeseburger song is a crime.
It seems plausible to me that people who are already lonely for non-gender-related reasons are likely to be more willing to consider radical changes to their lives.
There was actually a wellness Wednesday thread a long time ago, before the site move and maybe even before the split from SSC, where someone gave the advice to a depressed poster that if you’re dissatisfied enough with your life that you’re severely depressed, you should try radically changing your life before giving up on it. That post was actually one of the catalysts that led me to re-evaluate my relationship to faith, so I credit it positively. So I think the impulse to go, “let’s try something boldly new” isn’t terrible, even if we can raise an eyebrow at various ways in which people might try to do that.
But I’m also not a very radical dude, so “consider radical life change” apparently meant something like “maybe you should go to church.” The wildest and most unhinged thing I’ve ever done was drive to Indiana.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
Agreed. Sometimes I say things and I think, "wow, they're going to crack an egg over my head, aren't they?" and of course it's always a catch-22 -- denying gender dysphoria is often treated like repression rather than honesty.
My biggest concern with the trans movement is the possibility of sweeping up people who just don't fit in society for one reason or another and giving them a pathway that says they aren't 'defective', they have a real condition shared by dozens of us and now they're explained
When I was a young child I had a period of time where I legitimately believed there was a chance I was some sort of space alien Superman'd onto the planet. I just felt like I didn't fit. What's interesting to me is that this kind of narrative has almost entirely been captured by the gender and sexual minorities debate: when Pixar recently made a movie literally about a child who believes he might be a space alien, the critical response was that this was because he was gay, or transgender, or autistic. Even the concept of "being weird" has become a kind of regularized set of categories! It feels almost high modernist: like we are supposed to have such a profoundly complete understanding of the human phenotype that every oddity can be precisely categorized and explained.
I often get along with transgender people better than some might expect of me based on my worldview, but I'd argue that I'd get along with them just as well had they never transitioned. I like people who don't fit. They're interesting, and sometimes more real.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.
I'd push back slightly here in saying that I've met trans women who are very much more on the "cries and hides in the bathroom" side of the fence, along with other behaviors that are often seen as exclusively female, like reading romance novels, preferring feelings-talk over camaraderie-talk, disliking playful trash talk, etc. I also know men like that without desire for gender transition as well. I think this is a stereotype of millennial men for a reason.
My native social orientation is more in the middle than something that falls into strict gender alignment. There are things about me that are clearly masculine and things that are questionably feminine. I have a penchant for making friends with people who 'fall through the cracks,' because often I find they're more raw, and you can get more depth out of them than people who follow the practiced scripts handed by socialization. I like people who are raw, a little unpracticed, real, authentic.
A concern I have about the trans movement is I worry that people with a less rigidly-gendered personality, but without gender dysphoria, are being handed a pathway that would purportedly connect them to other people who share their feelings of alienation but also comes with serious risks and drawbacks. The thing I would note is that a lot of transgender people just seem congenitally lonely, though of course the argument across the political spectrum is going to be that this is a chicken-and-the-egg problem -- are they lonely because of bigotry, or lonely because they always had things about themselves that didn't 'fit', which their transition never alleviated?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2mo ago
What are typically female behaviors in this context?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
No, I'm saying that I have met femboy/trans programmers who wear thigh high socks and hang out on Discord. If heterosexual programmers are wearing thigh-highs that'd be news to me too.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
Sometimes I read a post from you gattsuru and I end up having a 20-minute personal reflection on personal interests because you're just so matter-of-fact I can't help it.
But a lot of focus on the abs and hip lines near the abdomen have always struck me as more androphillic an interest
I don't want to say I'm the ambassador of the straights, but yeah. That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."
That said, this from Toa:
one item that has confused me for a long time in erotic art is the popularity of outfits (most prominently the iconic "bunny suit", but also many one-piece swimsuits and bikini bottoms) where the edge of the fabric rises from the crotch at a very steep angle (i. e., straight to a point lying above the hip bone), rather than a gentler, almost flat angle (to a point lying in the middle of the hip bone, or even below it) that to me seems much more alluring.
Is completely sensible to me. The attraction of the steep angle is it shows significantly more of the crotch region and forms a kind of sharp arrow down to the genitals. Every inch of skin in that space is considered pretty revealing if shown, and the mons pubis itself is subject to considerable erotic interest for straight men. I think the point of being attracted to this angle in bodysuits and swimsuts is that it's essentially the bare minimum angle before you're actually just displaying your genitals; it's right on the line without crossing it.
The counterintuitively-named boyshorts are sometimes designed with the near-flat flat angle and do work perfectly fine, even for women with very pronounced shapes (either hourglass or apple), even if they're still not quite comparable to a men's speedo. They can be pretty hot on women and are imo underutiltized
I don't know, I'm going to disagree with you there. Boyshorts aren't really interesting to me at all. They seem femboyish to me. Actually the twitter, uh, meme? strikes me as more resembling boyish aesthetics than what I associate with straight women, even though the characters are depicted with breasts. Maybe they're tomboyish?
I'd expect that for straight guys this is one of those cultural things where you fixate on what you're exposed to
It's funny that you'd say this in a post where you've linked to images of what I take to be furry femboys in striped thigh-highs.
My first serious girlfriend in high school liked wearing a striped, purple and black blouse a lot. Eventually just the shirt itself became attractive to me, and then striped clothing in general. In eroticwear the main use of stripes is in thigh-highs, and straight men have a thing for women's legwear in general, so I guess naturally the "stripes are hot" thing migrated there... so striped thigh-highs are my thing, as in "my college girlfriend actually bought striped thigh-highs in order to wear them for me" level of being my thing.
So it's always been kind of surreal to me that they became principally associated with femboys and transbians and... programmers??. I've definitely met a few of the Discord creatures that wear these as a mark of identity.
I think before that it had an association with scene girls, and that subculture was definitely around at a formative time for me, so I guess maybe it was a straight thing before it was a gay one.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
But since you've asked my personal stance, and have brought up specific things I've said, it has made me second-guess whether I'm personally consistent and not the young-earth guy with this stuff, and whether I actually know what I mean when I say things all the time (regarding gender)
Yeah, this is the big part of why some of us are confused by your view. It's not that I think you're inconsistent, it's that you seem to have had a major change of heart on this issue, but you're solely describing it in terms of logical consistency as a frame of the world. The gap isn't in logic, it's in personal experience.
Especially when you say this:
"Every "non-binary" I know of is either a woman or a male homosexual" - This one was written prior to me committing to my policy on pronouns/gender.
"... I would view it the same to a heterosexual male gynaecologist treating an attractive young woman." - ditto
That's a pretty big change, to go from "non-binaries are actually just women or gay men" to "gender self-id is logically consistent with the facts of the world and I choose it as a policy"! I feel like there's a whole part of the story that's missing, where you met a transgender person, or you read some stories, or you yourself dealt with gender identity issues... I feel like what we're getting is the rider's logical post-change ideas, not the elephant's emotional journey.
I actually went through a similar change of heart -- though obviously not as extreme -- and my earlier reply to you was in part a way for me to express that.
One of my key values, in terms of communication and persuasion, is that the most persuasive argument for any position is the reason why you, personally, believe it. If you try to craft a persuasive argument independent from your own reasons, you're simply going to construct a worse argument for your position... if it were a better argument than your own reasoning, it would become the reason you believe it! That's why a lot of my posts are emotive, and personal (perhaps more than they ought to be): I don't know how to argue for something where my head and my heart aren't both in it.
I think very few people, even in rationalist-lite spaces, are really all that interested in logical consistency. They're interested in living in a compelling narrative, or having some reason for their values that gets their whole self aflame. Obviously, as you see, this particular issue gets people immensely emotionally invested.
You obviously have some reasons for your change of heart, from dismissive comments about elements of the gender self-id movement, to a logical case for gender theory as a frame on the world, which you've used several comments to justify. What I'd like to hear, if you want to argue for it, or resolve your feelings of personal inconsistency, is what changed in you or your life that made you look at things a different way.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
I think the issue is just what you've said: this isn't actually how TRAs, or almost any transgender people actually view the situation, and anti-trans positions certainly don't like it. So what you've crafted is a steelman that means little, because no one's going to accept it. I agree it makes a sort of logical sense, in that you're not advocating for empirical facts of the world. But you are advocating for avoiding discussion of empirical categories that do exist, which in truth-seeking is simply a lie by omission: "Sex is real, but it just shouldn't talked about for moral reasons."
Actually, that part of your steelman is significantly more radical than at least some of the actual transgender people I've met! A lot of the less activist-minded trans people are often entirely comfortable with the reality of their sex, and agree that it's relevant for medical and documentary purposes. What they often want is simply people to use their pronouns out of politeness and treat them with general respect. They're often quite honest about the limitations of their transition and self-effacing, even. The fact that you're describing common self-identifications like MtF and FtM as "egregious" isn't a weakness in the trans movement -- it's a weakness in your steelman of it.
Frankly, I think the "use pronouns out of politeness, sex remains necessary for medical purposes" is where the moderate left position is going and has been for a while. That seems to be a much better bridge to the right, and therefore a useful steelman, than what you're outlining. Your logician's take on the phenomenon is logically consistent, but cold, stripping out any source of moral urgency from the gender self-id case and therefore losing out to more impassioned versions (on both sides) of the trans phenomenon. "There's no objectively correct answer, it may make a small portion of the population less sad, and some people like it because it's aesthetic," is not a good argument for a political position!
Where I think the trans movement went wrong is when gender dysphoria (as an experience, not a diagnosis) was stripped out of the essential core of interpreting gender transition. Gender dysphoria is a serious form of suffering. I've known people who dealt with it. I've heard some stories. And the idea that someone might have such a tremendous mental incongruity with their sex that they can't recognize themselves in the mirror and feel about their genitals the way people who get limbs blown off sometimes feel about their missing limbs -- that's horrifying. And it activates a lot of compassion, especially in people who aren't primed by activists to find the overall concept disturbing. It's the sort of thing where knowing a transgender person is much more real and compelling than any amount of activism, or any logical argument.
The strongest, by far of the arguments that trans activists marshal for their view is that the only known way to treat this experience of suffering is gender transition. I'm not 100% convinced this is true, or that there are no other options available, but it's at least a plausible claim -- and an empirical one. I have no problem with the option being offered to adults, maybe even teenagers with parental consent -- go on, give it a shot, I don't support that we build a huge legal regime to stop you. But that view has some caveats. At the very least, I think therapy to help gender dysphoriacs be more comfortable with their sex must be legally available. I also know people who struggled with gender dysphoria, and general gender identity crises, but overcame them with social support. If the goal is to actually make people "less sad," as you put it, then we have to ask the empirical question: What will do that?
That also prompts the question of what the second-order effects are of the absolute self-id gender identity theory framing are, including on people who experience struggles with their gender identity: if we make this a prominent part of our culture or offer people the option loudly, do we actually generate more gender confusion and dysphoria among the vulnerable than might actually exist in a vacuum?
In the real world, I see conservatives grappling with that question far more than trans activists, who admit no downsides to gender transition (though there are many), and don't even admit the existence of a tradeoff between making peace with your sex or transitioning. That's another one of the big areas where both your theory and the activists' framing is wildly off-base from the on-the-ground experience of transgender people, who from personal experience I know grapple with and make judgments on that tradeoff all the time. I remember one of our posters here talked about struggling with gender identity, and feeling like people they interacted with online were, to paraphrase from memory, "part of a cult that just wanted to increase the number of trans people at all costs." I also know we have transgender posters here who take a more generally transmedicalist viewpoint; I've found them pleasant and easy to relate to, despite the disagreements we might have.
So I guess what I'm saying is this: you're bringing a QED to a knife fight. There's blood involved. Surgeries. Severe mental distress. Suicide. You can craft the most logical argument for whatever steelman you want, but it's not going to build a bridge here -- certainly not by telling people they can't acknowledge a fact of the world, even philosophically, for moral reasons. The only thing that builds a bridge is raw and real human experience. Or in other words, empirical things.
I would call it something like "proleanime" or "e-prole." They're not pretentious, they don't want to hide behind many layers of irony, and they're not educated enough to even understand postmodernism. They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time. Also, they want to express their sexuality free from the constraints of modern feminism, which is often "performatively" sex-positive but "practically" sex-negative for anyone who isn't gay or trans. And sure, some of them are obese or ugly because lots of people are, but some of them are traditionally attractive too (like the girls who get super into cosplay).
It strikes me that this aesthetic is much more related to the old scene subculture than goths (as is e-girl subculture). e-prole sounds about right.
I know the type. The "they live in flyover country and have bleak economic prospects" thing strikes me as quite real. When rainbow hair colors started going big, I thought it was really strange -- around here that's only associated with the e-prole type, CVS worker, down on their luck, demoralized. There's a lot of hopelessness in flyover country, which competes with the hopefulness of family and faith and confusingly messianic-hope that "Trump will fix this broken country" and, of course, drugs. But there's a lot of hopelessness and a lot of drugs on the coasts, too -- I just don't know what hopefulness competes with it.
But I'll challenge that this is principally sexual. Or that cosplay is. Hell, the cosplayer I dated briefly in college turned out to be asexual, which made her the second woman I've dated that turned out to credibly claim asexuality and the fourth such woman I've had a crush on. Obviously neither relationship lasted long or went very well. (Women I've dated have turned out to be either sexless or more sexual than me, I still don't know why.) One of the latter two is someone I thought of when I read the description of the dinergoth.
I think it's fairly true that these folks are mostly politically disengaged, but in flyover country the type runs consonant with being a political leftist. But I'd describe the type as "politically disengaged because they believe the Democratic party is full of rich people who don't want to help people like them," or "politically disengaged because they believe the only solution to America's problems is gay space communism established through the revolution," which they fantasize about while standing dead-eyed at the CVS checkout counter.
I don't know that this is the default youth culture, but it certainly is huge. I'm an elder zoomer -- this is the end-fate of a lot of people I went to school with. The Asians and the gays went to elite colleges, the Christians went to <evangelical_school>, and the dorks, who I hung out with, often tried to go to college, dropped out, and ended up listless and hopeless.
Apparently I'm pessimistic tonight. I don't mean to be. I'm actually very proud of where I grew up and the school I went to, despite their problems. But there's real hopelessness out there, and everyone of my generation I speak to almost identically tells me they have no real hope for the future and almost feels humiliated in spite of their achievements. Even if they're married, have a good job, a house, friends...
That said, the author of this particular piece is far too pretentious, and far too apt to see the elements of flyover country he's noticed as meaningfully distinct from their coastal cousins. I see confluence between the e-proles and the coastal progressives -- a lot of it. In some ways it feels like he's just now realized the existence of social class in America, and is astonished to find that lower-middle and lower-class people in flyover country exist, and live different lives from coastal strivers, overfitting this astonishment to the particular problems of young people who struggle with mental illness. I know the type, "I have OCD and ADHD and major depression, I live with my parents", I know the type. But I'm not convinced this type doesn't exist on the coasts; just not in the upper-middle-class social communities that the author lives in.
By and large, these are depressed, poor people who see gaudy self-expression as one of their few remaining possibilities of mattering in the world. If anything, their existence says more about the hopelessness of modern America than about its objective economic decline.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
The reason they do that is due to being closeted or nervous about being seen on what appears to be a date with a man in public. The relevant term is "DL," for "down-low." It's not so much a skill gap as it is evaluating the risk of public exposure as worse than the risk of private catfishing.
That said, I suspect like a lot of the rough edges of gay culture, it's an inertia thing. They developed the "no meeting in public" culture at a time when public suspicion of homosexuality could be life-destroying, and never fully adjusted back.
The other part is that gay hookup culture is extremely aggressive, and there's a tendency among the particularly promiscuous to treat sex almost the way straight men treat masturbation -- in other words, without foreplay.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3mo ago
Blizzard games seem to particularly attract players like this, I guess because as a developer they've always put gameplay above immersion. (And kind of lucked into immersion with vanilla WoW solely because they were passionate about that world.)
I suspect there are lots of starcraft 2 players like you, just as there are lots of WoW players who rarely do instanced content and just level another character once they reach max level. Unfortunately, if you're a competitive player interested in demonstrating your mettle under constraint, simplifying or streamlining things sounds like getting rid of the game entirely. Hardcore gamers base a lot of their self-concept on their ability to perform complexity under pressure, and see it as the central pillar of playing games at all, so they perceive people who don't share that motivation as either weak (and therefore mockable) or deluded (and therefore dismissable).
I think the reality is you have to take a lot of hardcore gaming culture with a grain of salt; I think it's cool that people can overcome pretty immense challenges in games, but it's an entirely invented status hierarchy that's often in an antagonistic relationship with the game developers, and being able to put fun before status in gaming is an important part of maturity, imo.
I'm very much a cis male, but I do find this relatable. In some ways the impulses of male sexuality are annoying and distracting rather than fulfilling.
But in my case there are a lot of hypotheses that can easily explain it without reference to an etiological mismatch: religious upbringing, teenage dissatisfaction, but especially being inundated with feminist memes from tumblr when I was young, that have me walking on eggshells to know what's helpful. In a sense you could say that every superegoistic (to borrow without endorsement a Freudian term) influence on me has been about how my sexuality could go wrong, so it's very, very hard for me to intuitively know where it could go right. It's a lot easier to eject sexuality from your conception of the self if you see it as corrupting rather than enlivening. Repression and/or viewing sexuality as egodystonic seems like a common result of that kind of pressure, as it sometimes is for me.
I do wonder if some of the 'flight from masculinity' you talked about some men having has to do with that; the male sexual role asks much, and in modern times with limited and radically contradictory guidance, and I think it's much harder for men these days to understand who they're supposed to be than it might have been in the past. I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.
I've been meaning to write an effortpost on how male sexuality and male romanticism align or sometimes don't align, but I'm often reluctant because, as much as my posts here are highly confessional, I worry about exposing too much of my internal gears to culture war analysis, and anyway I'm concerned about reinforcing the belief that men are walking sex pests whose sexuality is inherently disordered rather than simply a biological urge that you can deal with in a healthy or an unhealthy way.
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