vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
It has been a while since I've read John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, but I've been ruminating on his conception of property in that book. He says:
Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
Basically, whenever you mix your labor with something out of nature, it becomes yours.
This conception was highly influential on the Founding Fathers of the United States, and it is easy to see the advantages of such a conception of private property for a brand new country. Sweeping aside the thorny issue of native Americans, if you have a vast wilderness of unclaimed territory, the idea of allowing citizens to go out, form a homestead somewhere and to recognize their claim on the land feels very intuitive and "fair."
Unfortunately, such an idealized conception of property ownership didn't actually exist in practice. Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow explores some of the things that happened in Appalachia over the history of the United States. Just within this microcosm, we see the way things often played out in practice, and it was far from the Lockean ideal.
It was not unusual for some rich landowner to lay claim to a bunch of land he had never even seen or set foot upon, and then to just sit on the claim without ever doing anything with it. Then squatters would move in, and make homes and farms on the land, before being discovered and kicked out.
It seems to me, if we take John Locke's account of property as our model, the squatters had a better moral claim to owning that land than the de jure owners in many cases. And yet again and again, we see governments recognizing the claims of absentee landlords over those of the people who had worked and improved the lands with their own two hands.
In many ways, property and its justification are core to establishing that society is "fair." So it is troubling to note a discrepancy this big between theory and practice so early in the country's history, at the very foundation of property ownership claims, poisoning everything downstream from them.
I think a toy example will help illustrate why this is such a big deal for the modern United States:
Imagine there's an island that has 10 heterosexual couples on it. This island is abundant in natural resources, and it has the following features:
- If 20 people work the land, it can produce a luxurious lifestyle for all 20 people.
- If 14 people work the land, it can produce a good (but not great) lifestyle for all 20 people.
- If four people work together, it is possible to trap two people in a 10 foot by 10 foot area of the island effectively forever.
Now, as we come into the island, 9 of the couples have come together and formed a gang. They claim that because their gang was the first to walk the circumference of the island, they have the best claim to owning the island and they will enforce their property claim against the 10th couple. They do not want the last couple collecting resources on the part of the island that had informally been "theirs" up until a few days ago, in which they had spent years building shelters and tools to improve their hunting and gathering.
The gang is going to imprison the couple in a 10'x10' part of the island unless they agree to recognize their ownership claim. Furthermore, while they're prepared to enjoy a merely good lifestyle for the rest of their lives, they tell the unfortunate couple that after they agree to the gang's ownership claim the gang would be willing to rent "their" part of the island back to them, as long as that couple gives them all a tribute that will take them down to a meager lifestyle, and take the gang up to a decadent lifestyle.
Left with no other choice, the unfortunate couple agrees to recognize the gang's ownership claim, and starts paying tribute.
Is the society on the island described above fair or just? I think most people's intuitions would be that it is not.
Now, imagine that several generations have passed. The islanders have expanded out onto several other islands, but the extra resources from the first island have resulted in a very uneven society. The descendants of the original gang own everything, and the descendants of the original unfortunate couple have never owned anything. They rent wherever they go, despite barely enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Did the passage of time, and inheritance of property down through the generations somehow make the society more fair and just? Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?
As I see it, there are three distinct phases when it comes to thinking about property rights:
- The initial distribution of property at the establishment of a country.
- The inheritance of property up towards the present.
- The free exchange of property among people of the present generation.
It seems to me like a lot of people are happy to start at step 3 and call it a day when it comes to how they conceptualize property, and its just distribution through society. A worker who is forced to sell their labor in order to make money to purchase the necessities of life is not being exploited no matter how little they're getting paid, and no matter what happened in steps 1 and 2 to get them to the place where they needed to sell their labor in the first place.
For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
Sure, I'd be okay with treating something like Bitcoin as money in some cases, since it bears enough of a resemblance to money.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
If society has to live a lie, it certainly is at a higher cost than if it is telling the truth. You cannot train everyone to lie everyday and expect no consequences.
I think this is a little overdramatic. There are plenty of "lies" that come at very little cost in a society.
Lies like "these people may not be biologically related, but as a legal fiction they are parents and children" or "this person wasn't originally from France and isn't of French ethnicity, but now they're declaring their allegiance to France now so they're French." There are even fairly strong social taboos against pointing out the differences between adoptive parents and naturalized immigrants in most cases.
I think viewing the trans "lie" as particularly pernicious or destructive to society is an isolated demand for rigor.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
What, in your mind, separates modern fears about the trans community indoctrinating children, and the old fears in the 1950's that gay men were hoping to turn your child gay?
I feel like human psychology is easily manipulated when it comes to children - see the Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger, and a dozen other hysterias that were wildly out of proportion to what was actually happening on the ground.
While a surprisingly high number of kids are putting "they/them" in their profiles, and saying they're non-binary, the number who are seeking surgery or other medical interventions is fairly low still. See, for example, this article which says that "[i]n the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis." That's around 258 a year, in a country of 330 million people. Even if you accept the "irreversible damage" line of thought, and think that a good portion of those girls will go on to regret it, that is a really tiny number of cases to use as the basis for fearing for the fate of your own children, or those in your community.
It just seems like people are myopically focused on a fairly unlikely outcome, and using that to justify clamping down on the freedoms of a lot more people as a result.
Don't get me wrong - I do think the medical establishment has a responsibility to take the well-being of patients into account, and so the moment the evidence is strongly in favor of discontinuing a particular practice, we should stop. The history of lobotomies is all one needs to believe that doctors can sometimes be horribly wrong - so we have to humbly consider that with any intervention we're doing. All the same, even if you consider every mastectomy of a female-bodied adolescent to be a terrible tragedy, the tragedy is much more bounded than lobotomies were back in the day.
I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.
A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?
Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Meanwhile, I can't trace a single actual harm to any trans person that could be attributed to JKR, who is apparently the final boss of transphobia.
I think the clearest examples of "harm" would be JKR publicly speaking out against the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill that would have made it easier for people to transition, and which was blocked from receiving royal assent by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack. It's hard to say if the Scotland Secretary would have acted the way he did without prominent voices like JKR preparing the public with arguments about why it should be shut down. To the extent that JKR made it easier for this to happen, she could be blamed for throwing her weight behind the movement to stop the bill from becoming law, for those who believe the law would have been good, pro-trans policy.
The only other "harm" I can think of is the cis-only women's shelter JKR opened up. I'll admit, the argument for harm is a little more esoteric here. It's the same kind of "harm" that the Salvation Army does in occasionally turning away gay people. Is it better that a flawed charity exists than no charity? Absolutely. But perhaps in an ideal world gay homeless people would also have shelters in such places, and trans-women who are the victims of violence would have a space they could go as well.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think an underlying issue is that for all that people try to propound the sex/gender distinction, I think pop gender theory is actually pretty bad about maintaining a strict distinction in all instances.
There's a proliferation of redundant terminology in modern English. For example:
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Man, manly, masculine, male, virile, masc
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Woman, womanly, feminine, female, femme
All of these words, to a first approximation are synonyms or derivations of the first word in their set (or that word in another language.) Sure, someone can try to carefully maintain that "masc" refers to ones clothing style and presentation, while "male" refers to your assigned sex at birth, and "man" refers to your social role. But I think the reality is that these all sort of blur together, and combined with the instinct to be nice to trans people, we end up in a place where a transwoman is a woman, a female, femme-presenting, etc. in a lot of people's vocabulary.
Recently, I put forward the word "signalment" as a word to refer to all of the medically relevant information about a person, including their assigned sex at birth, and their history of hormones and surgeries. I have no illusions that this will catch on. I've also considered solutions like "mating type", "gametic sex" or "chromosomal sex" - I think all of them could have their purposes, but I think at a basic level a lot of people just don't want to have a widely known method of referring to this idea.
I've even seen rants on Tumblr complaining about the fact that her cishet cousin had asked if someone was "assigned male or female at birth" - since she realized that now that this terminology had spread to normies, they were going to use it as a polite way of asking what sex a person "really was."
I think there will always be ways to try and refer to the trait transwomen and cismen have in common that differs with transmen and ciswomen, but it might just become a strange euphemism treadmill, where a word that would refer to the difference starts to just refer to the trans individuals in that category as well. The only phrases I think will remain immune are words like "sperm" and "ovum/egg" which will leave us in the weird, clinical space of referring to "individuals who naturally produce sperm" or something of that nature - functional, but very clunky.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Can you define what you consider the defining characteristics of modern leftist grooming?
How malleable do you think sexual orientation and feelings of social and bodily dysphoria around sex roles are in children? If we lived in a society where the concepts of gay people were generally unknown, and the idea of being trans wasn't common knowledge - about what percent of grown adults do you think would naturally and spontaneously be gay or trans?
Do you think the Left doesn't honestly believe their "closeted" model of the situation? (That is, that some percentage of the population will irreparably be gay or trans no matter what shape society takes, and any rise in numbers results from closeted members feeling more comfortable coming out, and not an increase in number due to malleable youth mistakenly identifying as one of these things?) Or do you just believe that it doesn't matter if they honestly belief in the "closeted" model, because they are wrong as a matter of fact, and their belief is just a useful myth that keeps them recruiting for their in-group?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet.
I'm an atheist, and I wouldn't say I'm "ignorant" of anything. I've been highly interested in religion and mythology since middle school, and I've done a lot of reading in this area. I've never really stopped reading about religion. I've read the Bible as well as religious and secular Bible commentaries, the Quran and several biographies of Muhammed, studied Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism in college, read pagan apologia like Sallust's On the Gods and the World and what remains of Julian the Apostate's Against the Galileans, and recently I've been reading through some important Vaishnavite Hindu texts, like the Srimad Bhagavatam. I've attended services everywhere from Eastern Orthodox churches to Hare Krishna temples.
I'm not convinced of the metaphysical truth claims of any revealed religion I've investigated, and I'm not compelled by watered down forms of religion like deism or "spiritual but not religious."
I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.
I'm very curious. I've constantly investigated religious texts and rituals around the world. I like to think I have an open mind.
The most I can say is that the concepts of metis and signalling have given me grounds to believe that religion could have some place in society to make large social groups function well. But other than that pragmatic argument, I don't think I've been convinced by any particular religious claim.
What do you consider the place I should have ended up in after I had done all my investigations?
Think this is simple. Trans people go to hell unless they repent. It’s not something in gods image but a perversion.
What particular kind of soteriology do you subscribe to here? Do you believe any Christian goes to hell for any unrepented-for sins, or do you just think that being openly trans is a mortal sin that destines one for Hell if one does not repent (as opposed to a venial sin that does not)?
I'm curious how you think being created in God's image relates to sex. What does it mean for a female human to be made in the image of a masculine God? I know that the Holy Spirit is grammatically feminine in Hebrew (though neuter in Greek), and there are a few feminine metaphors for God peppered throughout the Bible, but isn't God usually a "He"?
God didn’t create half men half women.
Sure, but isn't it a Christian belief that many of the natural "evils" of the world are a result of original sin, without being themselves sinful? Just because there was no cancer in Eden, doesn't mean that a person getting cancer is sinful.
Why you do you think that medically and socially transitioning as a trans person is more like theft than cancer?
And how do you square all of this with the many references to eunuchs and their place in society in the Old and New Testament? It seems like it is fully possible for a eunuch to be a faithful follower of Christ, and wouldn't trans people arguably belong to that category?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think a big confounder here is how often trans people lie to doctors. It's not hard to find the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V-TR and just memorize the script to get the treatment you want. I don't have a time stamp, but I believe Abigail Thorn talks a little bit about it in this video.
It's really unclear to me, if any testimony from trans people themselves should be taken to be an accurate description of their internal experiences, or a script they learned to tell doctors and the public that optimizes for acceptance and ease of understanding. They might hold a more complicated position that they don't share because it would undermine their claims.
I'm socially liberal enough that no matter what the actual underlying case may be, I can justify pronoun hospitality, nickname hospitality, and access to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries. But I'm not sure if something like Blanchard's typology, or social contagion theory, or something-something autism turned out to be the underlying cause of transgenderism that the general public would agree. If it turned out that the vast majority of trans people have brains more similar to their sex assigned at birth on the whole, and that became a widely known truth, I don't know what fate would await trans people at the hands of larger society.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I'm not sure you're thinking about it correctly.
First, the math you're doing implicitly assumes who any two people vote for is an independent event. But there might be social, political and economic reasons why the people in a single small subsection of a city all vote a particular way. If the type of people who live in a single neighborhood isn't completely random, and the type of political messaging that appeal to a person aren't randomly distributed throughout a state, then you might completely be wrong to treat the voting events as independent.
In addition, even if you assume that the events are independent, then the real comparison you're making is all of the votes cast in the entire United States. You might be right to say that there's a generous 3.5% chance of a single voting division of poor black people going for Obama. But the question really is, how many of this kind of black voting division are there in the entire United States? How many degrees of freedom did the people looking for claimed irregularities have? If they hadn't found 59 majority black voting divisions in Philadelphia going to Obama, are there similarly striking "irregularities" that might occur entirely by chance that they might have looked for instead?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Have to agree with /u/Testing123 here. Hbomberguy's evidence that Man In Cave was plagiarized from a single article was fairly convincing. For what it's worth, I also think Internet Historian and James D. Rolfe came out looking the best of all the plagiarists in that video. For Internet Historian, it seemed to only be a single case of blatant plagiarism, while for Rolfe it seems like he is mostly guilty of selling out (all of the actual plagiarism done without his knowledge by his scriptwriter.) Meanwhile, it looked like iilluminaughtii's entire career was built off of sloppily plagiarizing documentaries, and James Somerton just compiled and read essays from other thinkers in the space, including entire books.
Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category.
The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.
To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?
Does it matter that it occurs in 10% of people? If being left-handed had instead occured only in 0.01% of people would it then be correct to say something like, "Humans are a bipedal, right-handed species"?
We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."
I think if we're being as pedantic as possible, the best you could say is something like, "Your body works in way X, most people's body works in way Y, but with a surgery Z we can make your body work in way Y as well."
Of course it does, but why should that matter? Nobody is going to be swayed because from a descriptive linguistic stand-point, "groomer" means X and "transphobia" means Y.
The people who say something like, "J.K. Rowling has never said anything that is transphobic" and the people who say that she has, don't necessarily disagree about what she has actually said. They disagree about whether what she said is bad or not.
The people who say something like, "Left-wing groomers are brainwashing children to mutilate themselves" and pro-trans people, don't necessarily disagree on certain statistics like the number of transitioners or detransitioners. They disagree about the causal web that leads to that, and whether schools with more permissive policies nudges the causal web towards bad outcomes or not.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
On the other end it doesn't really buy the redneck anything at all either, it's just weird men in dresses that call themselves something different, maybe with some state enforced normalization. It only manages to be consistent by not actually engaging in all the places where other models bite bullets.
Can't the "bullet biting" just be done on a case by case basis? I see no issue with a negotiated settlement like:
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Adding trans people to the list of protected classes in society, making it illegal to fire someone merely for being trans, or to deny them service on this basis.
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Social transition allowed for minors, medical transition (including puberty blockers) banned or with many difficult hoops to obtain.
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In public schools, trans minors participate on the sports team of their adoptive sex in non-contact, non-fighting sports. In fighting sports and contact sports, they participate with their natal sex.
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For private sporting leagues, allow each league to judge for itself whether to be inclusive or exclusive.
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Require all public schools and government buildings to have at least one unisex bathroom, and let private organizations do what they want regarding who can use what bathrooms. (Perhaps create standardized signage, or a sticker that can be used to let people know a bathroom is trans-inclusive or -exclusive.)
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Keep all dangerous sex offenders, regardless of sex in male prisons.
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Medical transition legal, but only covered under government healthcare for people with severe dysphoria. (Or limited to cost-effective options like hormone therapies.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Short version everyone complaining about this is getting what they deserve.
I don't think this is a productive comment. While it's true that the influx of new players from actual play podcasts has resulted in tabletop gaming becoming a younger, queerer, and more progressive community than before (I have witnessed the transformation first-hand on Tumblr) I don't think the rest of us who haven't been calling for witch burning should have to suffer just to spite them.
This is because of WotC's greed, pure and simple. Hasbro isn't doing well, and the command has come down from on high to make D&D more profitable, and the people in charge made the calculated risk that shrinking their fanbase but increasing the amount of money they were getting from them would be a gamble worth taking. They want to become like Games Workshop - small number of actual players, but that small number is super dedicated, and is happy to fork over all their money no matter what shitty things you do.
Well, now that they've motivated WotC to put all this effort into privatizing the community so that they can kick witches like me out, WotC is looking at this fantastic weapon they've built, and are mugging the "content creators" who cheerleaded my banishment with it.
I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's. They just included clauses that would limit two things lots of people hate in the hopes that they wouldn't overly scrutinize the new license.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
As another example, consider the case of Loudon County covering up a rape because it was done by a transwoman
This one isn't really a good example for the anti-trans side, is it?
The two students involved were fuck buddies and had met for liaisons several times in the school bathroom. At the time of the incident, they were meeting up, but the girl was intending to cut things off. This doesn't seem like the typical example people think of, when they think of the dangers of transwomen in women's bathrooms. Like, are women seriously scared that they'll arrange a meeting with a long-time, trans sexual partner in the bathroom, and that partner will react badly to them ending things and assault them in the bathroom? No, the fear is always that a stranger will assault them, and there's still very little evidence that this happens often enough to warrant the fear people have of it.
I thought there was also confusion as to whether the attacker was actually trans, or merely a GNC boy. Regardless of that, at the time didn't the school not have policies in place allowing trans students to use their preferred bathrooms? So, if lack of such policies is supposed to protect women, this case would tend to be a bad argument in favor of it.
Obviously, the school shouldn't have tried to cover the incident up. But that is sort of separate to whether it actually supports the anti-trans side.
vorpa-glavo
30d ago
I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?
This feels like it works best for middle and upper middle class trans/gender non-conforming (GNC) people, and terribly for every other kind of GNC person.
Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job. Good numbers are hard to get, but there's plenty of anecdotal accounts from trans people who had trouble finding work because they were non-passing trans people, and I don't think there's any strong reason to doubt their accounts even without good hard data on discrimination that shows up in "legible" parts of society.
I seriously doubt affirmative action, and DEI initiatives have made things much better for all trans/GNC people in this regard. (I mean, isn't it common knowledge that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been cis white women?) Sure, a progressive tech firm might happily hire a trans woman as a software engineer, but for every company like that there's probably a dozen bodegas and fast food joints in more conservative areas that don't want to hire a teenage cross-dresser in their first job, and that lack of work experience might echo out into their job prospects down the line, amplifying the effects always present because of their status as a recognizable cross-dresser.
Part of the reason that Weimar transvestite passes looked interesting to me, is that they seemed like exactly the sort of legal vehicle that one could attach non-discrimination laws and cultural norms around. I know more libertrian or social conservative types would still have issues with such a regime, but I do think it would overcome the basic issue of "telling a societal lie" that many people claim is their main objection, and I think a world with transvestite passes and social norms of pronoun hospitality (enforced by social censure, and not legal censure) could get 90% of where trans advocates want things, and without any obvious "lies" or "metaphysical nonsense."
That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics.
I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.
There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.
I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.
I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.
There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim.
As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Exactly! And that's why it's way past time that John Henry be depicted as a trans pan differently abled bi-racial Latinx!
Oh, but John Henry is different? Why?
You seem to assume something I don't agree with. Sure, bring on every variant of John Henry under the sun! Give me a white Black Panther, or an Asian Othello - nothing is forbidden in storytelling. I have experienced multiple versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, and I would imagine if you asked a person 100 years ago about a version where he's a little person, they would have thought it strange, and yet I loved Peter Dinklage's portrayal of the character in the musical.
John Henry is not an exception to what I say. Even sacred figures like Buddha can sometimes wander across cultures and become a Catholic saint.
Changes need to be organic, not "how many boxes off the DEI bingo card can we tick?".
I'm curious what you think the process is for a change to be "organic".
Do you also think Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer, which recasts the orcs as the good guys, is inorganic?
Do you think the decision of Marvel's writers to take the originally red-haired Thor and turn him into a blonde character is "organic"?
Do you think that the manuscript traditions of the Mahabharata where the lower caste character of Karna is made more powerful is "organic"?
To me, there is no "organic" or "inorganic" retelling of a tale. There is only the storyteller's art, and what you make of the material you are given. If I was retelling the Greek myths, there are parts I would embellish and polish and things I would omit and they all feel perfectly natural situated in the particular time and place I am in. Saying any of the changes I would make are "inorganic" is to assume there's some way I "should" be telling the story, which I reject.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Fair enough, but even that 1.02% is just measuring the likelihood of a gender dysphoria diagnosis. I doubt that all 1.02% of people in that group are getting the full suite of medical transition. Unfortunately, we don't have good numbers on minors getting surgeries, HRT or puberty blockers.
I still stand by my original statement. 1.5% of an opioid overdose death is a much scarier possibility than the apparently 1.02% chance your child gets a gender dysphoria diagnosis. Especially with how many gender-non-conforming children desist by the end of puberty, I actually find it fairly likely that the 1.02% is still something you should weigh less than other ways your child's life might end up being screwed up.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".
This is a very strange thing to say, because whatever else "wokeism" might be, it's not relativist. Wokeism has a very strong, dogmatic view of the world, and judges everyone and everything by its exacting standards. There's a reason people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are cancelled by woke puritans - they judge these complicated men by modern, woke standards and find them wanting.
I mean, as much as the stereotype is that wokeism treats Islam with kiddie gloves, or is happy to excuse anti-woke practices if they come from a minority culture or religious group, I actually think that's only a practical constraint for coalition building. If the woke have their way, then the only permissible forms of Islam will be those that have been reformed from the inside to be woke-friendly, and every indigenous culture will be turned into a hollow shell of their former selves that woke totally-not-colonialist propaganda forces them to be.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Didn't Jesus encourage people to maim themselves if their body parts were causing them to sin? I know every Christian except Origen and the Skoptsy ignored the literal meaning of those words, but if Jesus is pro gouging your own eyes out, why would he be anti genital mutilation? Especially when his chosen people were expected to lop off a part of their anatomy to prove they were part of a covenant with God?
I also feel like you didn't address the eunuch idea. Eunuchs existed and were common in the past. There are certainly Old Testament references forbidding the use of castrated animals in sacrifices, preventing castrated sons of Aaron from serving as priests, and castrated Jews from entering the temple, but the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 seems to imply this is not a prohibition that applies to Christians.
If making yourself infertile is such a big taboo, why is castration never explicitly forbidden anywhere in the Bible?
Well, the final report of the Cass Review just dropped. It's getting coverage in mainstream publications like the BBC. Surprising no one who paid attention to the interim report, it concludes that there is insufficient evidence in the realm of trans healthcare for children:
Critics are already jumping on the fact that the report used the GRADE approach to categorize evidence, which only allows randomized control studies to be classified as "high quality of evidence" and which can drop non-blinded studies one level in assessed quality, thus preventing many non-blinded studies from qualifying as high quality evidence. (Bold is edit added later. See ArjinFerman's response below, and my response - original GRADE standards can be found here.) The critics point out that double-blinded randomized control studies just aren't possible in some areas of medicine. For a simple example, if the intervention is something like "cosmetic breast augmentation", then there's logically no sensible control group - since there's no placebo that can make people believe they got bigger breasts when they didn't. (It's worth pointing out that this criticism of GRADE isn't unique to trans activists. The Wikipedia page for GRADE mentions it is criticized in general when it comes to slowly progressing diseases like atherosclerosis, where observational studies are easier to perform than RCTs.)
As a result of the GRADE approach, we read things like this in the report:
My own opinion is that I can partially agree with Cass that I want to see higher quality studies around trans healthcare for children in general, but I think that her methodology (using GRADE) is of the sort that will always say we "don't have enough high quality studies", and so her arguments don't have legs to stand on. A problem I see a lot in studies is using some "industry standard" for investigating a topic, and coming to a result of some kind, but failing to justify why the "industry standard" was the best thing to use here. In a better version of the Cass Review, I would have liked to see a few paragraphs justifying the use of GRADE, and explaining why they used this standard and not some other standard.
I mean, isn't that a thing good scientific reports in general do at all steps of the process? Think of what a critic would claim about your model and methodology, and then explain why your model or methodology is the best one to use in this particular instance. Show that your findings are robust even if you used some slightly different model or methodology, and explain what conditions are necessary for your model or methodology to fail. A quick search through the Cass Review shows that it doesn't seem to have done this. It just used GRADE, didn't really justify the decision, and didn't discuss alternatives or why its arguments are robust under alternative assumptions about the data.
It's a bit circular to arbitrarily use a standard that will say, "there are basically no high quality studies in this medical field" no matter what, and then to conclude in your recommendations to the government, "We need more high quality studies before we do anything more in this medical field!"
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