vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
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?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Sure, but that's usually why the state/power is the "tie breaker." It doesn't matter if I think a white woman is kidnapping a little black child, if the records of the state have her as their guardian, then power will back up her claim.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
How about from another angle then?
Adoptive parents put in a lot of work to be considered parents, but adoptive children are adoptive children irrespective of how much work they put into the relationship.
Perhaps trans people could be considered adoptive members of their preferred sex, not because of the work that they put in, but because of all the work doctors have put in to their transition. For a post-everything trans-woman, shouldn't we recognize all of the hard work the doctors put in and allow them to be considered members of their adoptive sex?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
That's only an argument against identification as a standard. It would still tend to leave transmedicalism on the table. If someone spends years medically transitioning and jumps through legal hoops, doesn't the comparison to adoptive parents get off the ground?
That would just leave "identification only" as a courtesy of sorts. The same way that a kid whose parents just died, might have their aunt and uncle take care of them for a few weeks before all of the legal paperwork is taken care of.
vorpa-glavo
20d ago
Nothing that I said contradicts your clarification. Hyperdulia is still less than latria.
It goes: latria > hyperdulia > protodulia > dulia. (Or more accurately, latria is qualitatively different than dulia, and not on the same track at all.)
I mean, you could probably make a similarly complicated chart for Christianity to be fair. Make branching paths for Arianism, Nestorianism, Filoque, Transubstantiation, Marian and Saintly devotions, Apostolic Succession, Mormonism, etc.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
If you ask me how many billion people I would rather die than my cat, my emotional response is I’m okay losing the three billion+ people in Africa and China and India and such. I don’t know those people. My cat loves me.
Logically though, there’s gotta be a better way to strike a balance between partiality and self-interest, alongside recognizing it’s pretty hard to justify a moral system that values my cat so much. If you recognize that other moral agents exist and that you should seek fair compromises as much as possible, then that seems better than any alternative I’m aware of.
Yeah, as someone who has long been roughly aligned with utilitarianism as an ethical philosophy, I've wondered if it's not better to think of it as one answer to what can happen when a lot of people with policy-making power come together, and want to justify their policy goals in a way that most people would consider "fair."
Basically, if a politician wants to build a road, and they're going to have to tear down your house to do it, it's easier to swallow if they justify their decision by saying they took everyone in the country's well-being into account, and they think the new road is going to do more good than your house in its current location is doing. (It is also easier to swallow if they try to be fair to you by giving you enough money to relocate, so you can reap the benefits of the new road as well.)
I've long wondered if "discounted utilitarianism" or "reflective equilibrium hedonism" would be a better philosophy for individuals to adopt instead. Basically, acknowledging that you don't value the life of 1 foreigner the same as 1 person from the same city, and you don't value that person as much as you do a family member or friend. So you just discount each circle of concern by the amount you don't care about them. You might say, "Well a person from China might make my phone, and that has some value to me, so I value their life at 0.001 times that of one my friends." And then you can do the utilitarian calculus with those decisions in mind. Let the 1-to-1 values be in the hands of politicians and diplomats who have to work out fair policies and justify them to their constituents.
vorpa-glavo
3mo 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
3mo ago
I do think it is hard to design public debates that function as a genuine meeting of minds and not just a spectacle for good rhetoricians to flex their skills. But even so, I think ymeskhout's proposed format is a good faith effort to make something that will lean more towards the former than the latter.
You don't need to be a lawyer to take down a lawyer. Someone who did speech/debate or forensics in high school, who is a reasonably competent public speaker, and who has the weight of evidence on their side would probably do a reasonably good job arguing against a lawyer who is bullshitting all their points.
See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
- An adult human who produces ovum.
- An adult human with XX chromosomes.
- An adult human who lacks the SRY gene.
- An adult human who has a vagina.
- An adult human who doesn't have a penis.
- An adult human capable of becoming pregnant.
- An adult human whose adolescent development was dominated by estrogen.
- An adult human whose adolescent development was naturally dominated by estrogen.
- An adult human who was classified as female shortly after birth.
- An adult human who passes enough tests in this list that the majority of people would call them a woman.
- Etc., etc.
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
The first point you highlighted is an example of a "trait cluster" sex model, and I think it can form one basis of accepting trans women as women.
How feminized does a male body need to be before it is "female"?
I do think you're right that some sci fi technology may come along to throw a wrench in the current form of the debate. What will people say when you can do gene therapy and grow a new set of genitals to order for a person?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Scott's idea of categorization is a pragmatic one, so I'm not sure he would agree that it's all that vulnerable to the attack of "what is a whale?" or "what is birth?"
It might be philosophically unsatisfying, but humans do just tend to categorize things in their environment, and pragmatism is fairly happy to take large swaths of categorization for granted. Something like the category "dog" just naturally emerges from a human interacting with a lot of dogs. Likely for reasons of computational and memory efficiency, we're not the kind of animal that looks at one furry quadruped and treats it as a new and completely unique entity, and then encounters a similar furry quadruped and forgets everything we've learned as we try to learn all the new and unique rules that apply to this separate entity. We find patterns, and one of those patterns is something like what we label "dog."
The boundaries of these spontaneous categories are always fuzzy and ill-defined to start. Then, when humans engage in goal-directed behavior, we take all of these spontaneous categories and find the boundaries that are most important to have a consensus on with respect to that goal-directed behavior.
Why do we have words with well-defined boundaries like "cow", "heifer", "bull", "steer", "cattle", "calf", "milk", "beef", etc.? Because for the art of cattle ranching (which groups a number of goal-directed behaviors together), all of those distinctions are important. A steer can't have offspring, but might be suitable for pulling large equipment. A heifer doesn't produce milk, a cow does. And so on, and so forth.
Just by interacting in the world, humans are going to have a fuzzy version of the "woman" and "man" categories in their heads. Depending on our needs, we can change those fuzzy borders into well-defined ones by looking at what we're using the word for. We're perfectly happy to say that Shakespeare's Othello is a "man", even though he's just a fictional representation of a man. As a fictional character, Othello can't do any of the things usually characteristic of a man - he can't actually breathe, can't eat, can't sleep, and he certainly doesn't produce sperm that could impregnate a real flesh-and-blood woman. We're happy to omit the very important context that "Othello isn't real, and any sentence said about him is about the fictional story he belongs to", because most humans can understand the concept of fiction and don't really need reminding.
I think the distinction between a trans woman and a cis woman is going to emerge at some level of the discussion, because there are goal-directed reasons to make the distinction. If a cis man wants to have his own biological children, then he'll want to impregnate a cis woman and won't have much luck with a trans woman. But... the distinction exists. Even just "trans woman" and "cis woman" captures the distinction pretty well. I think the fight over the specific word "woman" is a distraction. We have "toy bears", which we're happy to call "bears" despite them just being paint and plastic. In a trivia game asking for "famous bears" most of the "bears" will actually be fictional representations of bears, and not flesh-and-blood bears. So, why can't a "trans woman" be a "famous woman" in a trivia game?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Sure, but I wasn't proposing a self-ID regime.
I'm okay with legal hoops comparable to adoption or naturalization.
For people who haven't yet undergone the legal hoops, people can still treat them as honorary members of their identified group, the same way people might say, "You might not be my daughter, but I already feel like I'm your mother", or a close friend might say, "You still have some legal hoops to jump through, but you're just as French as anyone else in my book, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
My point was that we already have many malleable socio-legal categories in society that amount to "lies" if taken absolutely literally. I fail to see how legal gender transition poses any notable risk to society's foundation.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I do think it's only a tiny minority of trans people claiming to be "biological men/women" of their identified gender. "Biological" as a modifier for sex and gender is one that fell by the wayside years ago - but I think words like "gametic" or "chromosomal" are much more specific while emphasizing the point being discussed.
Veronica Ivy might be viewed as an "honorary" woman, the same way adoptive parents are "honorary" parents despite their lack of biological connection to the children they're raising. But with current technology, "honorary" women lack many of the feature of cis women, such as the ability to produce large, immobile gametes or XX chromosomes. Maybe that technological barrier will be overcome some day, who knows?
vorpa-glavo
1yr 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
1yr ago
I'm sure they do have sincere beliefs, but you introduced the idea that medically transitioning is a mortal sin that damns one to hell. That wasn't a take I've heard before, and I was curious what exegetical process got you there.
Even Catholic doctrine has the idea of "invincible ignorance" which might plausibly leave some trans people not responsible for any sins committed while medically transitioning, which makes the churches clear teachings about the sinfulness of medical transition easier to swallow.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think the issue is more that privacy is the hardest thing to preserve if you want to not accommodate trans people.
If you make the rule "people must use the bathroom of the sex on their driver's license (which cannot be changed)", that would preserve privacy (compared to a genital inspector regime), but it would be a very easy system to game. All one would have to do is get a fake ID, which minors already do to get drinks before they turn 21. And it also ignores the fact that in the United States no one is required to carry an ID, and in many states no one can be compelled to show their ID if they don't want to.
Plus, it would result in the situation of passing trans people being forced to use a bathroom that might still make the occupants uncomfortable, and it has the issue that butch women might be harassed more in bathrooms by people doubting their right to be there.
What's your proposal for enforcing trans-exclusion in bathrooms, that is resource-efficient, doesn't create a whole bunch more bureaucracy, doesn't accidentally target gender-non-conforming cis women, and doesn't make anyone uncomfortable with their bathroom-mates?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I suspect that the number of transwomen is low in the first place (around 1 in 1000, iirc) so the answer in raw numbers is obviously going to be cis men, unless there's insanely high amounts of abuse against transwomen, which doesn't come out in the statistics I've seen.
I do think a shelter for traumatized men would probably be able to help transwomen, but I don't think one can ignore the argument that traswomen might be more vulnerable than other people at a men's shelter. The sad fact of intimate partner violence is that appx. 50% of it is reciprocal, so many of the men in a men's shelter will be both victims and perpetrators of violence. Women's shelters already have ways of screening for and dealing with victimized women who are themselves abusive and toxic and who make recovery more difficulty for other women at the shelter, and I'm not sure what will have to be done for a shelter for male victims of intimate partner violence to ensure they don't victimize other vulnerable people at a men's shelter.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
She's not some cackling villainess ladying over the only shelter within 1000 miles; she provided another option in the market. The real complaint is that there can be no dissent.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that she merely "added another option" to the market. The shelter is private property, and she has every right to deny service to anyone she wants of course (subject to any laws her area may have about discrimination against protected classes.)
However, I think if some eccentric billionaire opened up a new homeless shelter in a town that already had one, and denied service to people whose names started with the letter U, the billionaire would probably be within their rights and also be acting as an arbitrary jerk. Don't get me wrong, the good the billionaire is doing is almost certainly outweighed by any pettiness or arbitrariness he is exhibiting, but I think it would be completely reasonable for people to protest and advocate for the billionaire to start admitting U-namers to his shelter. The main thing here is that A) the infrastructure to help is already there, and B) the group being denied service is small enough that adding them to the pool of people served won't dilute the resources by an appreciable amount.
Ciswomen are obviously capable of sexually attacking ciswomen, and I am sure women's shelters already have ways of dealing with potential abuse between the women they are helping. Especially considering that something like 50% cases of intimate partner violence are "reciprocal" with both partners acting violently against one another.
I have heard anecdotes about the very first women's shelters having to find ways to deal with violent and abusive women who made things worse for other women at the shelters. That being the case, I don't actually see much reason to be concerned about transwomen being admitted - screen them with the normal risk-assessment profile they use for everyone being admitted, and if the risk is too great ask the woman involved to find some other service to help them.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Sure, in an ideal world there would be sufficient resources for society to organize to help all people no matter what difficulties life throws at them. In our imperfect one, we're left to rely on what limited resources charity and government intervention can bring to bear on various problems.
I've already said that I'll accept imperfect charities as a practical matter, but I think the criticism with something like the Salvation Army or JKR's Beira's Place is that the populations they're denying service (gay people, trans women respectively) aren't going to add that much strain on their resources, and it seems petty to deny them.
Hopefully, if it is felt that there is some large unmet need for rape crisis centers for men in the Lothians area, someone will try to open such a facility.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I don't mind answering these questions, but before we go on, can we acknowledge that wokeness is a solid concept, no worse that literally anything else that we've come up with to discuss political issues?
Well, I don't conceive of wokeness in the same terms you do, but I do acknowledge something like it is happening.
I consider wokeness to be a constellation of progressive tactics and policies that edge into anti-liberal territory. But in my conception, I have had trouble drawing the boundaries around it, which is why I am curious about your conception of it. Some things like politically correct speech, cancel culture for ordinary citizens, and safetyism all seem like parts of the constellation, but I don't have a good definition of what definitely isn't wokeness, and I was curious about your defintion.
I normally wouldn't consider affirmative action to be automatically "woke", for example. Something can be a bad or inadvisable policy without being "woke", as I see it. And I do think one could possibly justify certain formulations affirmative action on the grounds that it makes pluralistic liberalism function better, and not on any other basis.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I believe the teaching is something like: If Nirvana and Samsara were independent existences with their own free-standing essences, there would be no way to move from one state to the other. It is because they are both empty (sunyata) of independent existence that we are able to achieve Nirvana. Within conventional language, there is a distinction between Nirvana and Samsara, but an awakened mind realizes there is no essential difference between the two states, and can begin to experience the world in the mindset of Nirvana as a result.
I'd Google "Nirvana is Samsara" if you want a more in depth explanation, since it's been a while since I've studied it.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I write kinky transformation stories, and it's fairly competent at coming up with new plots along these lines if you prompt it with the right sort of things that don't ring any alarm bells for the content moderation of ChatGPT.
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.
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?
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