vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?
A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.
But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:
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Produces only sperm
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Produces only eggs
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Produces neither sperm nor eggs.
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Produces sperm and eggs.
The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.
But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.
Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.
Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.
I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.
But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.
If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.
But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.
All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.
But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."
Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.
There weren't that many more gay people than that, and we were asked to rearrenge society for them, and were assured that any claim there will be further demands was a fallacy.
Gay people didn't present a major restructuring of society. By and large the same people are in power, the same economic system is in place, and the only major difference is that two people of the same sex can sign a contract they couldn't before. Gay marriage did nothing to weaken globalist neoliberal capitalism - since that system is relatively egalitarian and doesn't care if the person at the top is a man or a woman, gay or straight, etc. You can have capitalists and laborers regardless of how you treat gay people.
We now have further demands just as predicted, therefore the slipperyslope claim was correct.
I seem to recall the specific claims I encountered pre-Obergefell being more along the lines of, "people will want to marry cats and dogs!" or "what if people make pedophilia or incest legal?" While I'm sure there are fringe weirdos advocating even those, I think the fact that the "slippery slope" ended up mostly being people asking for trans people to be legally and socially recognized and to have access to medical interventions is rather less alarming and catastrophic than interspecies marriage or pro-pedophilia/incest claim would have been. I think there were good arguments against these kinds of concerns, and the pro-gay marriage people tended to be right on these specific issues.
I don't recall anyone pre-Obergerfell saying, "If we legalize gay marriage, then we'll have 4,780 adolescents starting on puberty blockers after a gender dysphoria diagnosis over a 5 year period and 14,726 minors will have hormone therapies, and annually around 300 13-17 year old girls will have breast reductions a year in a nation of approximately 73 million total children, accounting (all numbers together) for approximately 0.02% of children." My complaint here is not that no one got the exact numbers, since that would have been unreasonable to expect, but that no one got remotely close to the (relatively small!) scope of the issue, even if I'm sure you could dig up someone pre-Obergerfell making emotive claims that gay marriage will break down the idea of man- and woman-hood, and plunge our youth into a deep spiritual crisis around gender.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the error bars on some of those numbers I'm quoting are high enough to make your average person worry more about the number of trans people. But I think there's a basic motte-and-bailley happening here all the time. When people want to be alarmist, they'll quote the "30% of Gen Alpha is LGBTQ" type of surveys, or point to a 400% increase of referrals to a gender clinic of the last 5 years, or bring up a single clinic in a single country that didn't vet children hard enough. But when people point out that, as far as we know the actual numbers of kids receiving breast reductions or hormones or puberty blockers is relatively low, it's crickets.
I'm generally not impressed with claims that the trans issue somehow poses an existential threat to our society. The numbers just don't add up to that. Even if society evolved to the point where trans people became our palace eunuchs, our celibate priests, our castrati, or our skoptsy, I tend to think that otherwise healthy societies tend to have ways to route around such issues. This article claims 20% American women born between 1885 and 1915 never had children. WWI killed 6% of the adult male population in Britain.
We're regularly producing large populations of people who will never have children, and a healthy society would be able to bounce back, route around and deal with this problem. If that's not happening, then the trans issue is just the straw that broke the camel's back, because we couldn't get enough of our other societal structures functioning right.
Also, if the low numbers of trans people mean their demands aren't a big deal, does that mean you'd be ok with rejecting them entirely?
I don't think society needs internal scapegoats to function. That's just a strong tendency humans like to indulge in.
I don't believe in the perfectibility of human nature via education, but I want to believe that we can set up society in such a way that alarmist claims about a tiny minority of the population aren't a necessary glue to hold everything together. We could channel those instincts in more productive ways than taking 1/1000th of the population and throwing them under the bus to make the rest of us more comfortable.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
Can someone steelman why “pride” is still necessary? Seems that you can be gay, bi or trans and it’s more than accepted - there’s a huge increase in kids claiming lgbt status so if there’s stigma it’s not apparent anymore. At what point does it make sense to call a moratorium for social movements that have lost their purpose? What are the “victory conditions” for what homophobia is considered no longer a major issue?
Because no country is a monoculture. Even if there's many places where gay, bi or trans people can live lives free of judgement or condemnation, there's still households or towns that have homophobic or transphobic cultures.
Put another way. It doesn't matter if, say, 70% of people in your country of 330 million are at least tolerant of LGBT people, if the people you live with or around happen to belong to the 30% that were intolerant. My friend group has several LGBT people who grew up in conservative Christian families and are now the black sheep of their extended family. They still deal with a lot of baggage because of it, even if they've found a loving community who accepts them for who they are.
There's also the fact that tolerance might only be surface level. I've heard trans people talk about trying to get jobs, and in many cases employers will just laugh in the face of a "boy with makeup and a dress" and refuse employment even in unskilled labor, regardless of whether that is blatantly illegal at the state level. It's not a universal experience, but I think there's many reasons why there's a stereotype of computer science having a lot of trans women, aside from the well-known autism connection to being trans. I think computer science is a "disembodied" enough profession that already probably has a higher tolerance for weirdos, and also happens to make large amounts of money that make expensive surgeries that might not be covered by insurance possible.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
I feel like this is a weak sauce slippery slope, if it is one. It's hard to find good numbers, but this article claims around 2% of Gen Z and 1% of Millenials identify as trans. And I would wager a large portion of those are just non-binary with no plans for any medical interventions, but even if we assume that all of those people identifying as trans are all chasing medical interventions like surgery and hormone treatment this is hardly enough to destroy a society.
In pre-revolutionary France, the First Estate of clergy made up 0.5% of the population, and theoretically all of those people were supposed to be celibate. Even acknowledging the hypocrisy and non-compliance of some of those clergy, you're still looking at a social institution that causes large swathes of people to be childless if it is strictly adhered to. And yet the biggest issue people had with that institution were things like the Catholic Church owning 6-10% of the land in France, and having an outsized influence on French politics. It was not a widely feared thing that people's sons or daughters would become priests or nuns and be forced to live a life of celibacy.
I think that 1 or 2% of trans youth is not the main ill our society faces, and if we had other working social institutions, structures and norms, we could easily deal with 1-2% of the population becoming sterilized. Our low birth rates are not because of decisions that 1-2% of people feel emboldened to make because of greater social acceptance. I think general social atomization, and an emphasis of comfort over duty are greater issues facing our society than whether a tiny minority choose to sterilize themselves.
All of the other issues like trans women in sports are minor distractions barely worthy of serious discussion. If professional weight-lifting can self-regulate and have de facto anti-doping and pro-doping leagues, then I'm sure that left to their own devices sports organizations running women's sporting events will figure out ways to deal with trans women without the need for outside intervention or pressure on anyone's part. Far more serious are questions of women's prisons and violent trans offenders, and I feel like that only becomes an issue because it is the tip of the iceberg of suffering in prison. Violent trans women prisoners are a useful prop, but do most people shed tears for prisoners (men or women) and their bad living conditions the rest of the time?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
discussion that homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic mammalian species on the one hand,
I don't think any major political coalition goes so far as to deny "sexual dimorphism."
I hate to keep ringing this bell, but I actually think the disagreements of fact between well-researched pro-trans people and well-researched anti-trans people is fairly small.
Ask any empirical question, and you'll get agreement on what our technologies and medical interventions today can and cannot do, and what unknowns exist in this space. I've read the WPATH Standards of Care, and most of the objections people bring up (GNC kids mostly desist, puberty blockers might have effects on bone density, etc., etc.) are all discussed and given weight in the discussion. They acknowledge risks, and gaps in our current understanding all over that document.
On the other hand, normative discussions like:
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Which sex-seggregated spaces should trans people have access to?
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Which sports divisions and teams should trans people participate in?
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Should trans healthcare be included as part of government provided healthcare?
aren't directly based on empirical principles to begin with.
Sports rules aren't handed down from on high - we very consciously make decisions about what form we want a sport to take. If including transwomen in a women's sporting division is undesirable to some, then another league that only allows cis-women could exist alongside it (much as weightlifting competitions have pro-doping and anti-doping competitions happily existing alongside one another.)
With all other questions, we have to determine what risk tolerance and error bars on current knowledge we have as a society.
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
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
10mo ago
The strongest form of the gamete definition is not gamete-focused around a cluster of traits. The strongest form only concerns gamete contribution to sexual reproduction, which is binary in mammals. Sexual reproduction is a well defined process at the core of sexual selection, which has been known since at least the publication of On the Origin of Species. Examples of a species in class 1 are male. Examples of a species in class 2 are female. Examples of a species that are in class 3 are sterile. Examples of of a species in class 4 are hermaphrodites.
I think the issue is that this biological definition is rarely relevant in a human context.
First, humans in the anglosphere (at least) tend to think sex is salient even for prepubescent children who are unable to reproduce. We presumptively use "he" and "she" for kids even though we know that 9% of men and 11% of women experience reproductive issues. Even after a person has become physically mature, we don't generally say they're "not a man/woman" just because we discover that they don't produce gametes properly, or can't reproduce for any number of other reasons.
I agree that your four classes are a categorization scheme that should exist somewhere in the English language. It's very useful to biologists, and an important idea for people to understand.
It also seems to have only a weak correlation to how we colloquially use language.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I just came across a word that I feel could be very useful in the trans debate: signalment. Specifically, I'm inspired by the way the term is used in verterinary medicine.
Signalment is a complete description of the patient including species, breed, age and date of birth, sex and reproductive status, whether the animal is neutered or intact.
I feel like this term captures an important point I've seen brought up in a few contexts - that a person's status as transgender might matter to their doctor, and their sexual partners, but it doesn't matter much to their social interactions in ~90% of cases. "Signalment" seems to capture the idea of "medically necessary information needed by a physician to narrow down their search space and provide quality care." Just as it might be important to know that dalmations are more prone to bladder stones than other breeds, it might be important to know that a patient is "Female, with a hysterectomy, and on testosterone for the last 3 years" because that might provide unique medical information that could be useful to the proper treatment of a patient.
I think it also bypasses some of the issues people take with terms like "biological sex" or "gametic sex."
Instead of saying, "Your biological sex is still male though", to a transwoman, you could instead say, "Your sex signalment is 'male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years.'"
Then we could have the following distinction:
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Signalment: All the medically relevant information about a patient.
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Courtesy title (honorific), personal pronouns and gender identity: All of the social information that will make interacting with the patient easier.
So a patient might be Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], with a sex signalment of "male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years."
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
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.
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
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.
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
1yr 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
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
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
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'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
1yr 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
1yr 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
13d ago
Addressing the other parts of your post:
That demand seems arbitrary to me, and "that's what we use for everything" is a perfectly fine justification.
I agree it's "fine" from a CYOA point of view, as in, no one will be able to blame you for using a standard tool used across the industry. But from the perspective of trying to perform a Bayesian update based on the final report, I'm not sure I agree.
A lot of the scientific method in general is a heuristic crystallization of Bayesian approaches, and so I have no doubt that a lot of what is present in GRADE is justifiable across a wide swath of evidence, and comes to largely the same answer as a Bayesian approach would. But I think that if GRADE systematically downgrades some kinds of evidence from being "high quality", which in a proper Bayesian approach wouldn't require any serious adjustment, that can lead to certain evidence being ignored or de-emphasized compared to where it should.
My opinion is that trans activists and researchers wildly oversold the scientific basis for the interventions they were promoting, and sometimes they were outright lying ("puberty blockers are reversible"). They could have just not done that, and tried to gradually accumulate stronger evidence. But the way things are, gender medicine should have never seen such widespread adoption, and people who allowed it should probably be punished.
I think absent any other evidence, just the existence of the Replication Crisis is enough to call a lot of medicine into doubt, and I see no reason why this wouldn't apply to trans healthcare. That the evidence is weaker than often claimed, is almost certainly true. (I'm not sure that that isn't the case for a wide variety of healthcare fields as well though - is trans healthcare uniquely bad, or is it just as bad as medicine as a whole, and do we need to adopt a whole swath of reforms to deal with things like p-hacking, the file drawer effect, small sample sizes, etc.)
I agree with Cass' conclusion, even if I question her methodologies, because I want to see higher quality medical evidence around trans issues, and especially trans kids. I want the medical research to be beyond reproach, whatever conclusions it comes to.
The basic problem with medicine, across the board, is that we're routinely doing barbaric things to be people, and the only justification we can have is that the evidence shows it will have a better outcome for the patient. Chemotherapy involves poisoning a patient with the hope that the poison will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. Amputating a limb might be a tough decision sometimes, but it is most justified if a patient would likely die if you didn't do it.
I want the evidence we use in all instances, especially trans healthcare to be airtight so that no one can say we're poisoning people or removing functional limbs or organs for no reason. It'll still be "barbaric", but if it can be justified as much as chemotherapy, then I think trans healthcare will be in a good place.
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.
A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
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