vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
There was a great comment on the Motte (or perhaps even SSC, it was that long ago) in which the husband of a schoolteacher opined that his wife had noted that it was almost never the prettiest girl in class, or the handsome football player, who came out as trans.
Obviously, anecdotes against anecdotes is hardly good statistical thinking, but this hasn't been my experience, depending on how broadly one interprets "trans."
Within my friend-group, one female-bodied they/them person is hands down the most attractive person there - flat athletic tummy, great curves, etc. They're also a very autistic person who has trouble reading people, and I suspect that's the reason for them identifying the way they do. But they're polyamorous, and it seems like every unattached person in the group likes the idea of getting with them.
Though I suppose I'm being a little unfair, because a few of the trans people in my life have definitely reported something along these lines. One trans man talked about getting really into expensive gothic lolita fashion before admitting that wasn't working for him, and coming out as trans. And a trans woman I'm acquainted with reported a similar thing about trying to lean hard into male stereotypes before realizing it just wasn't working out for her.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment, any more than I've endorsed the view that you can just adopt an orphaned child at any given moment. I think in most cases and with most social groups, honorary statuses will require some kind of "social proof" for a group to accept them. In the case of adoption, it might look like filling out a bunch of forms with the government. In the case of trans people, it might look like paying $50 at your DMV to get your sex indicators changed on your driver's license.
The "social proof" doesn't have to involve the government, though that is usually the "easiest" path since it means that the people with the ability to enforce contracts through their monopoly on force recognize your claim as legitimate. However, if a national disaster created a 10 year state of anarchy, I think people in a community that already believed in the basic legitimacy of child adoption could have informal adoption with enough social proof that most of the people in a community recognized the validity of the claim.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I would have guessed the Covid Hysteria would have been when you were worried about "democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances" given the rule of law was thrown out the door, judges refused to do anything to help, and tens of millions of people were seriously harmed. Were you opposed to and outspoken against those vast power expansions and legal, constitutional, and civil rights violations?
I've written a little bit on my views on the Covid response here.
Free speech, rights, etc., only exist as long as the people who want them have enough power. When they don't have power, they are ran over irrelevant of whatever law or constitution or anything else.
Sometimes, I view it rather differently: A society allowing free speech is often a sign of the ruling coalition's power, and the weakness of its citizens.
China needs to control speech because they are weak. The speech of their people actually poses a threat to them.
The United States doesn't usually need to control speech because the ruling coalition is strong. The speech of its people poses no threat to its overall stability.
COINTELPRO is the kind of thing that happens in the US when a group poses an actual threat to the United States, and has moved from words to actions.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.
The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.
Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.
I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.
I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
Fair enough, my mental model was not that trans women are perfect little angels who never do anything wrong ever. (Though investigating one of your second link's cases at random showed that the assailant, Hannah Tubbs, hadn't transitioned until after the assault. So it's not exactly a central case of what I argue for - which is legal sex seggregation, not self-ID or biological sex.)
I'm also not convinced that the fig leaf of "(bio)sex seggregating" bathrooms makes much of a difference here. A quick Google search was able to show there are some cases of cis men sexually assaulting women in bathrooms without the need of cross dressing. The problem seems to be more a function of having a semi-private space, than anything involving society leaving specific openings. I would be against turning every bathroom into a Panopticon, even if it would make people safer, and I would be against banning fathers from using changing tables in the women's restroom if they need to. Why would I be against trans women in women's bathrooms?
I don't think it nudges women's safety much in either direction.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
I suppose I didn't make myself clear. I am somewhat sympathetic to motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists of 1954, and I don't have a great argument for why they should have seen political violence as beyond the pale given their island's relationship to the United States. The ordinary means of political redress were denied to the Puerto Ricans, and violence seems reasonable enough under those circumstances, even if I prefer if Congress would not be attacked by people for the sake of stability.
While I don't think January 6 posed all that great a risk to the country given how badly executed it was, I tend to be less sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. A big part of this is because I don't think the thing they were angry about - stolen elections - were a "legitimate" complaint, if we don't engage in a motte and bailley about what we mean by a "stolen election."
However, what makes one "acceptable" and one "unacceptable"? I would prefer if there were easy and widely accepted principles for when political violence was considered acceptable, but the mainstream answer seems to "never, except in retrospect."
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
The point of criminal laws is not to ensure that a thing never happens. We outlaw murder, but there will always be murders. The point of laws is threefold: 1) to discourage other criminals from committing the crime in question, 2) to reform the criminal so they never commit the crime again, and 3) if 2 is impossible, to safely contain a criminal away from the rest of society so that everyone else is safe.
My guess is that the number of gun-related assassination attempts in Japan over the last 50 years is probably going to be less than the equivalent number per capita in the United States. Now, if all-cause assassinations per capita were the same between the two countries (all else being equal), that would be evidence that gun control is unlikely to play much of a role in preventing assassination attempts.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Donald J. Trump is a celebrity and a politician. While I think it is ugly behavior to celebrate anyone's death or near death, I would expect anyone above a certain level of fame to have to deal with a whole spectrum of ugly behavior and have thick skin about it at this point. I don't know why people feel the need to deputize themselves to avenge Trump for this slight against him.
I also cannot emphasize enough that I haven't seen this woman's actual tweets. I don't rule out that she didn't post a bit of dark humor, which I think would be more defensible than literally and sincerely saying she wished Trump was dead.
Injustices happen every second, and the alleged injustice she suffered, is lesser than the one she wished upon a man much greater than herself.
Whatever she supposedly wished upon him, she had no power to enact it, and there is almost 0 chance that Trump saw what she wrote, or thought about it for more than a second.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
I feel like your logic is a bit twisted here. It would be one thing if the woman was part of the mob that drove that guy to suicide, but all we know about her is that she was loud about wishing Donald Trump's would-be assassin had been successful. Certainly an ugly sentiment, but completely disconnected from the behavior that drove that bar owner to suicide.
I'm actually a bit confused at you connecting these two separate things the way you did. Like, you're not sad about a random Democrat getting fired for comments she made outside of work, because some different Democrats harassed a guy until he committed suicide? How many Democrats do you think were actually involved in the decentralized harassment of that guy, or the culture of decentralized harassment in general?
According to Pew Research, 27% of US adults use Twitter/X, and 32% of Democrats report using Twitter. My guess is that only a portion of those Democrats are involved in decentralized harassment of any kind. Obviously, I would prefer if no one was involved in decentralized harassment, but it is a bit strange to turn off your empathy for people just because a small minority of Democrats do horrible shit. I bet a small minority of any group do horrible shit, and it would be terrible for everyone if we always held the larger groups they belonged to responsible for that.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
I actually think the Wikipedia page on women walks a fair line on the topic. The very first sentence uses "adult female human" as its core definition, and the second paragraph starts:
Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and fertile women are capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause.
I don't view the use of the word "typically" here the way you do. I think it is an appropriate amount of nuance for a reference work, since it makes room for discussion of intersex women. Now, I acknowledge that there's various decisions about how and when to include references to atypical examples in an encyclopedia, but I maintain that including mention of intersex women somewhere in the article about women is appropriate. Given the article's sections:
- Etymology
- Terminology
- Biology
- Sexuality and gender
- Health
- Femininity
- History
- Culture and gender roles
- Clothing, fashion and dress codes
- Fertility and family life
- Education
- Government and politics
- Science, literature and art
- Gender symbol
I could see the argument for keeping discussion of intersex women to the biology section, and creating a subsection for trans women under Culture and gender roles or something. But I don't really think that the Wikipedia article on the whole screams "captured by trans activists" to me.
It has a culturally genocidal element and is not unrelated to afrocentric ahistorical lies. It is cultural appropriation to the extreme.
I don't buy the concept of cultural appropriation. I've learned too much about things like Greco-Buddhist art and Daoist Christian syncretism to think there's anything wrong with "appropriating" cultures, even in the most sacred of contexts.
There's a difference between treating another culture or group with dignity and respect, and refusing to do anything with that culture's art, fashion or stories. I actually think it's a bit racist to refuse to let cultures mix and mingle as is their natural tendency historically. It would be much easier for humans if everything always stayed separated into Platonic ideals, but the reality is that especially in the Old World everything was very connected and ideas in one part of Europe might find their way to India or Japan given enough time historically.
The ideology of marxist nationalism or liberal nationalism for groups like blacks and other progressive beneficieries of progressive stack is key part of what is happening. And it is about racist devaluation of the history and culture of certain peoples to the benefit of other peoples and also under hateful spite from the perspective of an ideology that sees white ethnic groups as evil. Cultural marxism like original marxism promises utopia once the class enemies/ethnic enemies, oppressors are destroyed. This is part of said mistreatment, humiliation and destruction. Is cruelty and it is immoral and ought to be stopped and punished.
I think you're seriously misreading the situation in a number of ways. You see victory, and call it defeat.
When the Greco-Bactrian kingdom started depicting Buddha in Greek-style statuary, was this a humiliation for the Buddhists or the Greeks? No, of course not. If anything it showed the strength of Greek culture and of Indian Buddhist culture that when these two great cultural groups mixed they produced something new.
Western culture has been so successful that a Puerto Rican man made a musical about one of America's Founding Fathers and it was wildly popular. Was it a humiliation that many of the cast in Hamilton were black or Hispanic? Of course not, this is a sign of American and Western culture's strength, not its weakness.
I believe that people have a right to have their own history, culture, traditions and that being respected.
I'm sorry, but I honestly can't unlearn how artificial nations are. Modern Greeks learn about the Classics, even though a lot of Greeks are descended from the Ottomans and haven't got a bit of Hellenistic blood in them. The majority of French people didn't speak French until surprisingly recently in history. The drindl and lederhosen are the costume of specific regions of modern Germany, and not Germany as a whole.
It's all fake, fake, fake.
Not our nation of course. Our nation, uniquely among all nations, is autochthonous and authentic. It's totally real and wasn't the result of decades or centuries of nationalist agitation to make us think of it as primordial and true.
Plus, authoritarianism in favor of antinationalism and anti-religion anti-nation, anti-race has already been tried and found to be extremely repressive and destructive.
I think "nationalism" only makes sense if you are a nation. Yes, yes, I pointed out how nations are fake above, but the United States really isn't a nation. I like someone's description of it as a "civic state." Americans trace their origins to a common civic history, not a common birth like Japan or France.
At one point it might have been a proto-nation of primarily anglo origin, but today it is such a mess of ethnicities that I doubt if it can truly make itself a single nation, though the growing circle of those considered "Han" across Chinese history might provide an interesting template going forward. Certainly, "white American" has become somewhat of a group, as well as "black American" and those ties might be enough to call each group a nascent "nation." I just don't know if I buy that as a solid glue to hold together American society though.
Like, is it a humiliation to anglo Americans that many white Americans love institutions created by, of and for anglo Americans? Is it a humiliation that the anglo Founding Fathers can sometimes be depicted by people of obviously non-Anglo (if still white) actors?
Its tactical support of not caring about your culture/race promoted towards the outgroup. This necessitates for those who want to promote the general pro race swapping attitude to oppose the current status quo and the current movements with their motte and baileys, if they really are something different than them.
I don't know - I think Western culture is pretty awesome, but I'm not a chauvinist about it. I also appreciate (in Kipling's sense of the word) many of the non-Western cultures I've been exposed to. None of those cultures are "pure", isolated islands for the most part. Oni from Japan might have some influence from Indian rakshasa, and so on and so on, the lists of cross-cultural pollination are endless.
I'm pro-race swapping because I'm a student of history and the humanities, and those fields show again and again that you just can't keep a "pure" form of a culture around for any length of time. New circumstances always arise. There's always another tribe or nation or people along the horizon, ready to throw your conception of the world into disarray, or who just has a really cool story that you can't wait to put your own spin on.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
About what we saw until the 2010's?
That's fascinating to me.
On one hand, I definitely think that things like prison sexuality, bacha bazi and ancient Greece prove the idea that sexual behavior is partially a product of societal conditioning and material conditions. But I don't know how much that implies actual differences in people's underlying dispositions towards sex. If the story society tells is one where homosexuality is a moral failing, does this make a bunch of closeted gay guys, does it cause would-be bisexuals to bury their feeling so deep that they never act on them? Or can it actually affect a person's sexuality at the margins?
If there's been an increase of self-identified LGB people over the last 40 years, I think it's probably best explained by increasing societal acceptance, and perhaps some malingering from people claiming to be "bi" for social credit. However, I admit I don't know what to think of the T side of things. I suspect that the existence of HRT and other medical interventions does make the options look more attractive, but it's hard to say what that means in practice. More people in the modern world also get boob jobs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people wouldn't have been getting boob jobs through out all of human history if they had been available. They just happened to not be medically possible, so people used different methods like corsets and weird dresses to artificially create more feminine figures.
vorpa-glavo
2yr 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
4mo ago
Yeah, Biden did a lot of indefensible stuff towards the end of his presidency, and eroded any ounce of moral high ground the Democrats might have had left.
I think Biden and Trump have both abused the pardon power, and I would personally be in favor of a Constitutional Amendment requiring Congressional approval for each use of the power going forward. It's a shame too, because I mostly like the pardon power.
Biden proclaiming a new Amendment was a cynical move, but considering he didn't actually do any official presidential acts to make it so, it's closer to Trump's "gaffs" where he says he's going to do something unconstitutional and norm-breaking, but doesn't follow through.
But I also agree with other posters in this thread that we can criticize both Democrats and Republicans when they do bad things. We don't have to try and parcel out who was the first to defect. That's just partisan-poisoned thinking.
In some ways, I kind of want to reject the idea that all of our social policies should be aimed at minimizing female deaths like an autistic actuary.
As a simple example from another domain, I kind of don't care if the facts on the ground are maximally unfavorable to me in, say, the gun control debate because I am pro-liberty and am willing to bite the bullet on this. Even if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets that showed with 100% certainty that we could reliably remove, say, all ~40,000 gun deaths per year in the United States by repealling the 2nd Amendment (and the vast majority won't convert to knife deaths or whatever), I would still say we should prefer 40,000 annual deaths to the infringement of liberty that would involve.
I don't want to empower the government to enforce any kind of bathroom policy, and so I'm willing to put up with a few women falling victim to men and ex-men in the name of liberty. My opinion wouldn't change if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets showing that such a policy reliably leads to X female victims of violence each year.
I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers, and a number of other issues. I'm willing to bite the bullet on the idea that freedom often comes with negative consequences for part of the population. I still think the government should enforce contracts that turned out to have been bad bets (which is why I was angry when Scarlett Johansson was succesfully able to cow Disney during the pandemic when they shifted movies to streaming where she got a worse deal - she made a bet, and it turned out to be a bad bet. If Disney wants to smooth things over with her, they can do that outside of the context of a contract dispute as a show of good will, but in an ideal world Scarlett Johansson should have been forced to live with the original bad deal, because that's what contracts are for.)
If you live in a civilized country, you should have little trouble trusting your neighbors with weapons.
I mean, in my civilized country, a rando tried to assassinate the candidate of one of the two major political parties, so my trust is being strained.
My basic problem is that I can't say whether a rando trying to assasinate a political candidate is the 2nd Amendment working as intended (since it puts the power to decide when to overthrow tyrants in the hands of individuals), or if there is some principled way to criticize some acts of political violence as outside of the intended scope of gun rights?
I mean, you can own a car and it can't be taken from you by the government without due process and such (literally the fifth amendment), whereas operating one on private property is explicitly a 'privilege.' So no, there is no explicit right, but there's still an inherent protection in there.
The relevant comparison is whether it would be constitutionally possible for a Federal or State ban on cars to be enacted. I very much doubt if such a thing would ever happen, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
vorpa-glavo
2yr 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
2yr ago
I do think this kind of turns the "stochastic terrorism" angle on its head. Far from all the anti-trans rhetoric and legislation creating an environment where violence against trans people is more likely, it seems that trans and GNC shooters are more common in recent months.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
I'd rather not, I know next to nothing about India.
Fair enough. I thought it might serve as an intuition pump, but if you don't feel comfortable with the conversation, I'll drop this angle.
A non-woke argument would be one for ending legal and cultural discrimination based on caste.
Woke arguments start around things like Affirmative Action, and we've definitely crossed into them when unequal outcomes between groups are in themselves treated as evidence of oppression.
So, do you think in the immediate aftermath of ending some form of discrimination that no activist interventions is justifiable, even on grounds of prudence and support of societal stability after a massive change?
For example, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, a lot of Northern Christians poured into the South and started schools for the newly emancipated individuals. Is this woke, in your opinion since it is giving extra support to black people that white people aren't getting? If it isn't woke, is it because black people were genuinely unjustly worse off and this was an effort to redress that imbalance, or is it because it was the actions of private individuals and not the state?
Do interventions only start being "woke" once all major legal and cultural discrimination has been eliminated? If so, do you have a year after which you think it is safe to say, "all activist interventions after this point are woke, in the United States"?
I don't think it is "grooming."
You could call it "brainwashing" or something, based on one's ideological bent. But I think the prototypical case of grooming is an adult acting as mentor to a child in order to personally have a sexual relationship with that particular child.
To use an imaginary straight example, if a sex-positive progressive woman was trying to tell boys that their attraction to girls was fine, and that they should ignore Christian morality and pursue sexual relations with whatever girls will have them, we might consider that to be a bad sort of moral education, but that's not the same as her trying to butter those boys up for a sexual relationship with her (i.e. grooming.) She might just honestly believe that sexual liberation is a good thing for everyone, and not intend to ever personally benefit from the sexually loose boys she creates.
We should name harms correctly, and I've never heard a convincing, good faith argument that the conflation of traditional "grooming" and "grooming"-as-sexual-brainwashing was a good idea. It's like saying, "isn't it terrible the way that modern educators murder children?" and then I ask in surprise about what you're talking about, and you reply that many teachers teach kids pro-drug messages, which could result in their death, which is literally the same thing as murder. It might be a bad thing they're teaching the kids, but conflating two bad things is rarely a good faith argument tactic.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
I don't think Gays Against Groomers should be banned, but I suspect they're roughly equivalent to the Log Cabin Republicans or many other "we're tribe X, but we hold unconventional views for members of tribe X" groups. Usually, you can model them as being run by leaders who are secretly tribe Y, and who wish to undermine the efforts of tribe X.
Gays Against Groomers should get a fair hearing in society if they're arguing in good faith, and individuals should punish them with inattention and apathy if they're not arguing in good faith.
vorpa-glavo
2yr ago
But then again, I have the luxury of believing in Hell. God is the retributive one, and he doesn't convict the innocent, only the state does that.
I wouldn't describe the Christian God as "retributive."
If a Christian man murders 12 Muslims and repents afterwards, does the Christian man go to Heaven while the Muslims burn in Hell? That's not "retribution" and not even "mercy", it's abominable behavior of an unjust and arbitrary tyrant.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
At no point past 1920ish was this true for women (so no woman born/raised in the West knows what it's like to be uniquely oppressed- that it happened once upon a time is their origin myth, just like it is for the Indians)
While I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that women are less oppressed than is commonly claimed, I do take issue with your claim here. In the United States, The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, and was the bill that allowed women to get credit in their own name without the signature of a husband or male relative. I would argue that lack of access to credit in one's own name is a form of oppression, even if it could be counterbalanced by paternalistic or progressive benefits.
It is also worth pointing out that families and social expectations can function as "tiny tyrannies", even if people are theoretically free according to the law. My mom grew up in a fairly patriarchal household, and when my aunt got into the Air Force Academy her dad (my grandpa) said "no, you're staying right here with the family" and my aunt meekly accepted his word as final. On the other hand, my mom got into MIT and when my grandpa told her she couldn't go, she basically said, "I wasn't asking for permission, I'm going to MIT." My mom was also the most stubborn of her sibllings, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she was the one that left the state they all grew up in and became an upper middle class engineer, while the rest stayed nearby like grandpa wanted and mostly didn't do as well (except for the one aunt who got into real estate and banking.)
Women are higher in the Big 5 trait of Agreeableness, and I think that means that even in legal regimes that are relatively favorable to women, they can still get "stuck" in a tiny tyranny through mere social pressure alone. The women who escape are either unusually low in Agreeableness for a woman (like my mom), or autistic/weird enough that they naturally drift away when given the chance (like Aella.)
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Is it, though? Howcome when Trump passes his EO's the response from the mainstream media isn't "Trump Being Obtuse: Fails To Realize Trans Identity Is A Social Role, Not A Medical Claim", but "Trump'S Definition Of 'Male,' 'Female' Criticized By Medical And Legal Experts"?
I'm not responsible for the silly things other people claim, even if they come to conclusions that superficially resemble my own. Before I answer your question, let me touch on my feelings about Trump's EO.
On one level, I'm basically fine with the definitions of biological sex in Trump's EO, and I disagree with the critics that say they're malformed.
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
Gametic sex always felt like the best way to define biological sex to me, and I think that the people criticizing the "at conception" part of the definition are a bit wrong-headed. It makes sense that you can belong to a category (the sex that produces large or small gametes) even if you don't yet have the mature ability to do the thing characteristic of that category. A caterpillar is still a juvenile butterfly, even if it doesn't have wings.
I could quibble about the fact that at conception a fertilized egg can become one person, two people (twins) or half of a person (chimeras), and that this can technically lead to weird cases like this fertile chimera woman who was a fusion of two beings who, at conception, arguably belonged to the male sex, and the female sex - unless we count her conception as starting at the point where the chimera was formed, in which case it is not clear to me that we knew what sex she belonged to (based on the EO's definition) until she finally developed. Can a person's sex technically remain in limbo for more than a decade by this definition?
I could also quibble about people I would describe not as "intersex" but "nullsex." If sex is defined by gametes, what about people who don't naturally produce gametes? I always find it a bit odd that people with Turner syndrome (X0-karyotype) are considered "biolgical women." While they have gynomorphic anatomy, they typically do not naturally go through puberty, and do not have functional ovaries. If given hormone therapy, they'll go through a female puberty, and they can get pregnant through IVF with donor eggs, but under a gametic definition of sex they'd surely represent a third sex (a null sex.)
But I'm not inclined to such quibbling here. Law is an example of practical philosophy. Those corner cases will be dealt with by courts interpreting the definitions used. That chimera woman would likely be considered "female" by any competent court. So too, they'd likely class people with Turner syndrome as women, regardless of how the law defines "female."
To actually answer your question. I think the article you're talking about is pulling a bit of a motte and bailey. I read it, and what it claims is technically true. The director of the health institute they interviewed did indeed claim that the cluster definition of sex was a better model, and thought that EO ignored intersex people. The lawyer they interviewed did indeed worry that trans people and intersex people would be hurt by the order. Nowhere did the article actually try to defend "gender" (what I would call "honorary sex"), and there's actually a weird disconnect in the middle of the article. The cluster definition is certainly a defensible alternative definition of sex, but it's not one that seems to easily cohere with the issue of trans people (who would likely still be classed in their biological sex, even with a cluster definition.)
I think they think this is the strongest case they can make in an adversarial environment. Retreat to, "sex is more complex than this, what about intersex people?" and "it will hurt people" - not actually claim anything about the nature of trans people one way or the other.
What would it take to show that your view on trans identity isn't what is being imposed on society right now?
Cultural narratives that justify social change will do what they will, I have no control over that. LGB activists really enjoyed bringing up gay penguins and the like, even though it reeks of the naturalistic fallacy to me. But the "born this way" narrative really took off, and it was only natural that trans people would try the same rhetorical move. It's the same thing that happened with the anti-cryptocurrency people who recycled the environmental critique and used it against generative AI, even though the amount of energy being used is a drop in the bucket compared to things like airline travel, existing data centers' energy usage, etc.
I think it must always be weird to live through a decentralized social change. Sets of narratives will compete until one that finally wins the day and convinces people bubbles up to the top. The narrative that wins won't necessarily be "true" - just convincing.
I don't care that my "honorary sex" model isn't the one preferred by trans advocates. I think it is the most true model of the situation, until an artificial superintelligence studies humanity and fully explains every aspect of aberrant human psychology one way or the other.
While I agree with you that blurring the lines to conflate all LGBT+ education efforts and the direct sexual abuse of minors is irresponsible, and likely to lead to violence if taken seriously by the wrong person, do we actually know that his motivation had anything to do with this?
As far as I know, the police haven't made public any information about his motive, so all we can do is speculate over the exact origin of his hate. Remember that the claimed motivation for the Pulse nightclub shooting was supposedly in retaliation for US airstrikes against Iraq and Syria, but the shooter, Omar Mateen, had supposedly contracted AIDs from a Latino man and frequented gay bars himself. It's not clear to me that the Pulse night club shooting can be read as a straightforward act of hate against LGBT people, versus a very messy personal drama spilling out into the rest of society. How likely is it that Aldrich's motives in the recent Colorado shooting won't be a straightforward hate crime either?
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