vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Is this site able to do RSS feeds, like Reddit does?
It would be nice to be able to follow comments or threads with this feature.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I've said before on Reddit, but I'm pretty sure there's not much actual difference between the "maps" of pro-trans and anti-trans people.
On a whole host of questions, both groups would be in complete agreement:
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Can the person get pregnant?
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Does the person have XX chromosomes?
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If the person recieved no medical interventions would they have breasts or gynomorphic genitals?
The main issue seems to be whether there is a real category of "adoptive" men and women, who have the morphological characteristics of one sex, while trying to assume the social role of the other.
To that point, I'm not even sure the "gun to your head" bit is necessary. It's a it like asking adoptive parents: "Oh, you call Timmy your son? Gun to your head, would you say that Timmy has 50% of his genes in common with you?"
Not every culture has a concept of adoptive parents. (Notably Islam instead has "sponsorship.") And not every culture is going to have a concept of "adoptive sexual roles", but I don't think calling a trans person by their preferred pronouns is "lying", any more than calling an adoptive mother a mom is lying.
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
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
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
I know you're not directly claiming that the "transgender movement is [a] radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma" merely saying that "[s]ome other people might say" that, but I do want to reply to the archived Medium article you linked.
It questions whether a group that has support from billionaires can really be an oppressed, marginalized minority.
But it ignores that even during the 1960's civil rights movement, there were millionaires supporting certain figures in the movement like Martin Luther King Jr. (someone had to keep bailing him out of prison!) and Malcolm X even criticized this form of selling out in his Message to the Grassroots speech. Other posters may disagree, but I do think that black people during the 1960's civil rights era were a marginalized minority with legitimate grievances, and I don't think the fact that MLK Jr. was funded by white millionaires undermines his sincerity or authenticity, or paints him as a form of astroturfing.
Scott Alexander's libertarian defense of billionaires (here and here) is partially based on the fact that having a class of billionaires in society reduces the concentration of power in any one person or institution, instead creating a multipolar system where projects that aren't supported by (or even opposed by) current power structures can still get off the ground.
The fact that Jennifer Pritzker, a transwoman and heir to one of the ten wealthiest families in America, is donating money to pro-trans causes isn't suspicious or "astroturfing." This is a multipolar power system working as intended. The Right gets the Koch Brothers, and the Left gets George Soros and the Pritzker family - with plenty more examples on all sides of politics.
Now personally, I'll admit to having some misgivings over the "multipolar power" defense of billionaires, but the MLK Jr. example makes me think that sometimes this can be a legitimate argument. If the combination of a genuine grassroots, plus the money of rich people is what is necessary to end segregation, then so be it.
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.
Sadly, Vaush seems to be repeating a lot of arguments I've seen around Tumblr and Twitter about AI art.
He brings up the tired talking point of there being some sort of labor rights issue with feeding a bunch of artists' works into an AI and "stealing" their art in the process. No such labor rights issue exists. If someone is saying this, they fundamentally do not understand what the AI algorithms are doing. Don't get me wrong, there could be other issues with AI art, and we could decide as a society that putting human-generated content into an AI is corrosive to society for other reasons and pass laws limiting that if we wanted to - that's certainly a conversation we could have as a society, but I don't know why people are starting out with a wrong-headed argument right off the bat.
He is also in the "art is a form of communication" camp, which I think tends to be the biggest divide I see in a lot of these debates. Unfortunately, the intellectual groundwork has already been laid for "death of the author" analysis, where the question asked is not "what was the author trying to communicate?", but "what meaning can I as a reader/listener/viewer of an art piece craft from it?"
Borges wrote the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in 1939, which played with the idea of someone authoring a word-for-word identical rendition of Don Quixote today. In some of the most amusing passages, the exact same paragraph is quoted but given a different analysis based on whether Pierre Menard or Miguel de Cervantes was the author.
I've long been enchanted by the idea of taking a bunch of random books, pretending that they were all written by the same author and then trying to figure out what we can guess about the life of the author based on their literary output. What kind of author would write Winnie the Pooh, Starship Troopers, Call of Cthulhu, Foucault's Pendulum and the Acts of the Apostles? This is an endlessly fun literary exercise that will probably remain fun even after most of the content on our feed is AI generated.
(We've already seen joking stabs at this idea, with people claiming that Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter or programmed Minecraft, because they take issue with the original creator.)
I do like art, and I agree it often has communicative value. But "communication" might not even be that far off. AI text generation is also advancing at a considerable rate, even if it might be a while before we see a successor to GPT 3 that can write a whole novel from scratch. Maybe modern AI art is a babbling mishmash of parroted human communication, but in the future we might be able to make pieces that have genuine intentionality behind them even without full AGI. (This also ignores the current arguments about human prompt-makers and curators adding an element of intentionality to AI art.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I don't think /u/Minotaur was saying that Vaush says we shouldn't care. They were saying that they themselves didn't care.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think one issue I see is that the critics will never be satisfied. There have been tribes of neutral orcs since 2nd Edition, and Planescape allowed them to explore concepts like non-evil succubi (even demons can sometimes not be evil!), while 3rd edition gave us Eberron, which was designed from the ground up with the idea that traditional alignments not being relevant - with evil metallic dragons, broadly good orc cultures, evil halfling tribes, etc.
By the time we get to the 5th edition core books, race was already almost a non-issue. Alignment was a vestigial structure that barely mattered mechanically anymore.
Is anyone really offended by the idea that orcs might be stronger on average than humans? Is anyone really offended by the idea that a dwarf might be able to drink you under the table because they're built a little tougher? I kind of doubt it.
But once ability bonuses are mental, then people have a big issue.
One D&D is moving away from making ability bonuses for player races baked in. Fair enough. But this isn't going to fix the issue. Are mind flayers going to exist in the next edition of D&D? Is the default mind flayer stat block going to have 19 Int? Is the mind flayer elder brain going to have 21 Int?
If that's even sort of true, we're back at bioessentialism. Mind flayers and their elder brains are just naturally smarter than the average human peasant. Unless WotC wants to do something stupid like say "actually mind flayers have the same Intelligence range as playable humanoid races, and it's just the really, really smart ones who become psionic and start attacking people to eat their brains, but all mind flayers have free will and can choose to be vegans if they want" then mind flayers as a concept are going to remain problematic going forward, no matter how many steps they make to "clean up" the game.
Sometimes fantasy might call for nuance, or deeper understanding. And sometimes you just want to mow through a horde of orcs and not think too hard about whether they're inherently evil, or whether you could have talked them out of it under the right circumstances.
I agree with that. I'm not saying people are having badwrongfun if they decide to have vegan mind flayers. My issue is more that it will be a bad thing if every single fantasy race or species becomes interchangeable.
I think it will be a shame if 6th edition comes out, and instead of having a few paragraphs that flesh out the idea that mind flayers are a brain-eating, psionic, planes-spanning race, who once enslaved humanoids in a grand empire until they were overthrown and now live in pockets underground or in the stars, it says that mind flayers are not naturally different from other sapient species (except in their superficial appearance), but some of them (not all!) have a culture that encourages eating brains and developing psionic powers, and you're just as likely to find a mind flayer running a flower shop or having a nice cup of tea. Let the brain-eating alien abominations be evil!
Yes, as a DM, I can always add in whatever flavor from other editions or from my own head that I want. But I want the products I buy to provide some flavor and lore that I can chose to ignore, instead of saying, "here's a bunch of superficially physically different creatures, that are all fundamentally exactly the same, and we won't tell you anything in particular about how they 'usually are' because their culture is a contingent fact about them that will change from setting to setting, not something they have from birth."
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I have definitely encountered the hyper-individualistic idea of gender as a unique creation or performance that every person makes. It never made much sense to me, since I feel like it's a category mismatch. I wouldn't call something that has as many manifestations as there are people "gender" - I would call it something like personality, personal style, or something similar.
I think the other issue I have is that gender must play with the existing stereotypical sex roles in society.
If you can truly convince everyone that pink isn't a girls color, or that particular clothes aren't just for one sex or the other, you haven't created a world full of radical self-expression. Sure, boys will wear dresses and pink, and girls will wear boyfriend jeans and suits, but the meaning, the context of these things will have completely changed. It won't mean anything, because there will be no backdrop or framework to interpret these acts as subversive or unusual. It will just be one of many normal things for people to do, and when that is the case there is no point in actually doing it.
If AOC's "Tax the Rich" dress was something you could buy at Walmart before the Met Gala, she wouldn't have worn it, because the context would have been completely different. She would have gone with some other, completely different form of self expression as a form of protest instead.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Only if you cast a narrow view of "pre-third edition D&D."
0e used Chainmail combat, until the Greyhawk supplement added the d20 based combat system as an alternative.
1e used combat tables, but you could derive the whole table if you knew a character's THAC0, so that caught on as a common house rule.
2e finally made THAC0 a core concept.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
The wording (doubtless there are many) I recall is, "a system of gender roles which is harmful to men and women" or some such.
I think the issue with that definition is that it is too weasely. There's too much room to maneuver and keep claiming a patriarchy.
Harmful to which men? Harmful to which women?
Does it matter if a society made rational trade-offs of one kind of harm against some benefit that outweighs the harm?
I think before the Industrial Age, having a division of labor made sense. With all of the developments after the Industrial Age we shrank the scope of the woman's societal role until it was almost nothing (cleaning clothes for a family of five took 20 hours before washing machines!), forcing them to adopt "men's" societal role.
Now there's effectively only one role in the larger society. Stay at home mothers frequently get involved in MLMs, because there's nothing to do for most of the day - laundry takes two hours, watching one kid isn't that stimulating and a person can only take so much TV.
I'm reminded of complaints I've seen from the manosphere talking about the "feminization" of our culture.
I think many people are basically agreed that the life the average person lives in our society is fundamentally unsatisfying. But I don't think "patriarchy" or "feminized culture" get to the core of the issue. We're social animals staring at screens of various sizes throughout the day. We're so prosperous that we don't depend on each other for our individual survival, so it becomes much harder to cultivate deep friendships. We have a service economy that forces a lot of people to do jobs that humans in the ancestral environment we evolved for would have hated too.
Humans weren't built for this, and it has nothing to do with whether our society is benefitting men or women more. Ideally, society would settle on a set of norms that benefit everyone so far as possible, but we're so rich and prosperous that we get whatever we want to satiate our petty impulses and desires and rarely get what we need for a deep and fulfilling life.
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
1yr ago
JK Rowling might be a perfect example of most of these people being the most informed about the reason why they're supposed to hate, but I bet none of them know what she's actually said. They just know that she's anti-trans. But they'll still see the next Fantastic Beasts movie and buy the next Harry Potter game.
I have been a little disappointed in the anti-Rowling hypocrisy I see. I remember one thing that rubbed me the wrong way a while back. I was at a Ren Faire, and one of the performers made a "You're a wizard, Harry" joke and immediately followed it up with something along the lines of "Don't worry folks, that's only time we'll mention that TERF shit."
Like, either own the fact that you're making a Harry Potter joke or don't make one at all. Making the joke, and then virtue signaling that you shouldn't have made it and won't make one again seems like trying to eat your cake and have it too.
I've actually read Rowling's essay and tweets, and while I disagree with much of what she says, I can at least understand the emotional place she's coming from as a victim of abuse at the hands of a man. I'm not thrilled about the effect she's having on the conversation about trans people in Britain, but I haven't made the decision to boycott her.
Practically, I couldn't really "boycott" her nowadays anyways. The first Fantastic Beasts movie didn't wow me and I never saw the others, and most of her post-Harry Potter wizarding lore (particular her American lore) has been underwhelming to me.
I think I'll just do a matching donation to a pro-trans charity if I ever buy any official Harry Potter merch going forward. (I already did this on a recent trip in London, where Google guided me to King's Cross station, and I decided to pop into the Platform 9 3/4 store because I had time to kill before the train arrived.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Because in the USA we would definitely talk shit on someone from neighboring states, but only rarely do you see inter-county rivalry.
That's true, but I feel like inter-city rivalries are very real. In Colorado, it's a common saying in Boulder and Fort Collins that "if it smells like Greeley, it's going to snow." Greeley has a lot of cattle ranches, and it is the case that if you start to be able to smell cow poop, it means you're probably getting snow - but I've always felt that it was a bit of a dig at Greeley's expense as well.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.
Do you feel changes in diet couldn't explain much of the difference? To pick just one example, we know iodine deficiency during pregnancy results in adult IQ for the child almost a standard deviation lower than pregnancy without iodine deficiency.
I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food, and thus be close to their maximum genetic potential, while peasants would frequently have vitamin deficiencies and have their height and IQ stunted. Then industrialization and the scientific revolution happen, humans figure out most of the food problem and figure out how to address the most important vitamin deficiencies in the population, and you see the Flynn Effect for several generations, which eventually tops out at the point where people's natural genetic potential lies.
If this explanation is true, it would be very easy to try to hypothesize something like: black people tend to not absorb certain vitamins as well as white people, so many of them might have deficiencies that go unnoticed that lead to lower IQ. I tend to recall looking at data for iodine levels in black mothers in the modern US, and they have the lowest levels of any ethnic group - though still above what is considered adequate for the IQ effects. It doesn't require that many epicycles to propose the hypothesis that what is adequate iodine for other groups might not be adequte iodine for black mothers - or that the scientists got the initial number wrong, and more iodine is needed to make up for the deficit.
And even without such speculation, it would be very simple to speculate about vitamin deficiencies in general in the US black population. This would allow for a "cultural" explanation for low black IQ that has a "biological" solution (force black people to eat different food/offer some product that has bioavailable versions of the missing vitamins.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Nobel prize winners, high achievers generally in technical fields, as well as the most accomplished scientists and mathematicians and philosophers as well as would be at most 3%jewish, and at least 10% hispanic, and 10% black.
Can you explain why you think a world where HBD wasn't true would be one with a more equal distribution of Nobel Prize Winners?
There are five Nobel Prizes given out: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature, and Peace. I'm going to omit the latter two, because they seem highly subjective and more likely to purely be used as political tools (hence Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize for not being Bush.) So that leaves: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Medicine.
Suppose that the Nobel committee is good at awarding genuinely meritorious advances in all of those fields - that everyone who "deserves" such a prize gets one. What needs to be true in order for a person to earn their prize?
Well, first they would need to enter one of those fields of science. I could easily imagine an HBD-less world where an accident of history resulted in black people having a learned, cultural obsession with math, and as a result when a black person is really smart, they almost all go into the field of math and rarely cross over into the Nobel fields. This obviously isn't the case in our world, but I think the basic format of "Black culture pushes all smart black people towards fields A, B and C, which are not among the Nobel fields" is a legitimate answer one could give here.
There's also the component of being able to go to school to become a scientist in the first place. Prior to the GI Bill, only 10% of Americans attended college. Nowadays ~30-40% of people have 4-year degrees. But this shift after the GI Bill didn't lift all boats equally. Many black WWII veterans did not benefit from the GI Bill due to Jim Crow laws, since the program was administered by individual states and those in the South didn't want Black people to benefit. So just as the shift from 10% to 30% of Americans getting college degrees was happening, white people benefited and black people were often denied such benefits. That was 1944 - not that long ago.
It is not that hard to tell a story, where the first generation of "more people going to college" excluded black people, and black people today are still a generation or more behind white people as a result (but look much worse than even that, because they have to compete with white people who have cultivated a "college culture" for two or more generations already.) If one didn't believe in HBD, and leaned more towards cultural explanations, this doesn't seem that far fetched to me - though obviously it would need epicycles to explain black kids adopted by white kids having worse performance, etc.
In any case, I feel like the causal pipeline towards becoming a Nobel prize winner in a world without HBD has to be some combination of:
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Good genetic endowments (individual variance not group variance - ignore the various paradoxes people bring up)
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Good fetal environment (no fetal alcohol syndrome, etc., stunting intellectual growth)
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Good diet (no vitamin deficiencies that stunt intellectual growth, etc.)
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Good pollution/contaminant levels (no lead poisoning, etc. - I know the "lead poisoning" hypothesis took a blow somewhat recently, but it is illustrative of a possible class of explanations for lack of success)
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A culture that pushes one towards the Nobel prize fields
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The ability to receive an education that puts one on the cutting edge of the Nobel prize fields
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Luck (being in the right time and right place as the questions that lead to an important insight in science finally get asked)
I think there are so many factors that go into all of those that it is hard to make the case that we should see more of this or that group as Nobel prize winners. The US started adding iodine to salt in 1924 (iodine deficiency in pregnant mothers results in lower adult IQ in children), so I don't find it hard to sketch an explanation like:
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Prior to 1924, black people disproportionately suffered from iodine deficiency, explaining why they weren't Nobel prize winners.
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In 1923, leaded gasoline was introduced to the market, and not completely phased out in favor of unleaded gasoline until 1996, with black people disproportionately living in cities that ended up in the most contaminated areas due to red-lining.
Leaving the only period where black people might have had a "fair shot" from 1997-2023, and that's assuming we actually did something about environmental lead poisoning. Do you think these explanations are insufficient?
(Obviously, the above has been all very US-centric. But Americans have won about 40% of all Nobel prizes, so the above explanation surely explains some of the gap in Nobel prize achievement. I'm sure the rest of the argument writes itself for people familiar with non-HBD attempts to explain ethnic IQ gaps around the world.)
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I'm firmly in the camp of people who doesn't quite understand what a lot of "non-binary" people are doing with gender, despite being somewhat progressive and happy to exercise pronoun hospitality with such people. (I once heard an acquaintance describe their gender by saying, "if man is black, and woman is white, I'm purple - if you see me in monochrome, I'm more masculine, but really I'm not either of them" - and I was more confused than before I heard the analogy.)
I've seen various mottizens bring up the idea of "gender" being the latest subculture like goth or punk, and recently I stumbled across an interesting Tumblr post that accidentally circles around a similar insight. The whole thing is interesting, but I think you can get the gist from the following:
[...] I think there’s an interesting similarity in the way nonbinary (or genderqueer people in general) talk about the nuances of their gender and how people really big into specific music scenes talk about the nuances of the genres they listen to. Like there’s the description you give other people in your community, and the “normie” description you give to people who aren’t as familiar. And “genre” and “gender” are both constructs in similar ways too. Just my little binary observation tho.
and
so if someone identifies as a demigirl in some circles but to you they just say they’re nonbinary or even just “female”, they clocked you as a gender normie lol.
Now, I grant that the gender-as-fashion analogy isn't the only possible takeaway from this person's observations. I'm reminded of the "soul-editor" from the SCP Foundation Wiki that had symbols from every major world religion, as well as a few unknown ones. Who's to say that some phenomenological aspects of being human aren't so complex that no one set of vocabulary is capable of describing it all? Perhaps some qualities of human minds/souls/whatever are ineffable, or so unique and subjective that one cannot help but create a new label for oneself in describing one's personality?
But I have my doubts. Mostly, I often feel like people must be mislabeling something that I have in my "mental box" as well. (I've read accounts of genderfluid people who talk about "waking up feeling masc" some days and dressing the part, while suddenly and abruptly "feeling femme" partway through the day and wanting to change outfits - and I couldn't help but speculate if they hadn't attached special significance to what I label "moods" in myself.) I don't discount that there are many real human experiences that aren't in my "mental box." In a very real way, I can't do much more than guess what depression, schizophrenia, OCD or dozens of other seemingly real human experiences are like. If I'm being maximally humble about what a tiny part of the vast terrain of possible human experiences I occupy, I have to concede that I can't know that many people aren't out there experiencing "gender" in ways I never will.
My partner is a binary trans man, and many of my friends and acquaintances are part of the LGBT+ community. I still don't quite understand why someone in that extended friend group suddenly finds it very important to change their name, and let everybody know that their pronouns are "she/they" now - while changing nothing else about their appearance or presentation. I'm happy to use a new name for someone, if they don't make such changes too frequently for me to keep up with, but I often feel baffled by why they find it so important? It's not really a big deal to me, but I would like an explanation. Gender-as-fashion seems so tempting as an explanation, but I worry that it might be a false explanation flattening human experiences into something that's more comfortable to me - the same way, "that person who supposedly has ADHD is just lazy" might flatten a person with ADHD into a form more comfortable for neurotypical people, and not in a way that is very sympathetic to the person with ADHD.
You can probably see where I'm going with this but in the interest of plain speaking, the correct response to the gender theorists is "gender is just some term you made up to try and smuggle in a bunch of ideological assumptions in by connotation, Emerald Treespirit is just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be a woman by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'
I feel like no smuggling needs to be done. If we taboo the word "gender", I feel like I can build up more or less the same concept from the concept of an "adoptive sex." By analogy with adoptive parents - normally parenthood is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "parenthood" for adoptive parents. So too - normally sex is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "sex" for adoptive men/women.
I think even if you're just being descriptive, "adoptive sex" is real. The federal government, and most states allow you to legally change your documented sex - so if one wanted to be a translegalist (= a person is validly trans if they have formally, legally transitioned) then I think everything would work fine. I think translegalism avoids many of the issues with the identification-only standards, and works better than other de facto standards like a "passing" standard, or a transmedicalist standard. I've circled around the idea of considering myself a translegalist, who extends pronoun and nickname hospitality to people who haven't legally transitioned, or who have no plans to ever legally transition.
I agree with your assessment if we're carving reality at the joints, but legal fictions are important in people's lives. If legal fictions are descriptively in favor of translegalism, then it matters a lot to how trans people can live their lives. You don't have to believe adoptive parents are biological parents to believe that the legal regime around adoption has a lot of effect on the lives of all the people involved in adoption.
Essentially, I think there are two separate questions here:
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What legal barriers, or legal support is there for changing one's documented sex?
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What do trans people believe that makes them want to change their documented sex?
Obviously, the main disanalogy between adoptive sex and adoptive parenthood is in the participants' explanation of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. Adoptive parents understand that they were not "parents" in any sense before adoption, and that the act of the court is the thing granting legitimacy to their claim of "parenthood." Adoptive men/women on the other hand, often claim that they have always been their adoptive sex in some sense, and are merely seeking medical, social and legal recourse to reflect this personal belief.
But I'm not sure if that difference matters in practice. The law can be relatively agnostic to the why of people transitioning - I'm sure a lot of adoptive parents' desire to adopt comes from a religious background, but the state shouldn't have to decide that metaphysical question before allowing them to adopt. Similarly, I think the metaphysical claims of many trans people (that they either have a soul/mind of their adoptive sex, or that they have a brain more in line with their adoptive sex) is kind of a side issue to the first question. I'm okay with considering this almost a religious question (I don't believe in souls, and a lot of the brain evidence is pretty mixed) and moving on with my life. I feel like my translegalism+hospitality approach lets me see reality at its joints just fine, while still allowing people some freedom to live their lives the way they want to.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Human species has two biological genders.
You translated this from Finnish - does the original use a Finnish equivalent of "genders" here? Is any clarification offered in the original scale what they mean here? I can imagine people answering differently with slightly altered forms of the question:
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The human species has two biological sexes.
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The human species has only two biological sexes.
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The human species has two genders.
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The human species has only two genders.
Even if the original Finnish uses the equivalent of "gender" as opposed to "sex" without clarification, then it ends up functioning as a measure of wokeness more by being a shibboleth test than by being a good measure of underlying attitudes. English in particular uses "gender" euphemistically for "sex" in a lot of contexts, and it's only a small group of initiated individuals who make a strong sex-gender distinction in the first place.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Thank you for articulating this. I long suspected that something like this was the case, but my friend group is fairly thin on people with any negative reaction to trans issues. (Not surprising, considering my partner is trans.)
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Sadly, I think that in spite of me recognizing the edges of this phenomenon before your post, I'm light on ideas on how to route around this.
Part of it is that I believe there are other forces much more likely to "psychically castrate" your offspring than trans ideology. Almost my entire friend group is queer people, and none of them have plans to have biological children. Even my old college friends who are in long term relationships or getting married have no plans for children. My sister is dead set against children (and that was before she learned about the heritable medical condition she has.)
The birth rate is low in the Western world, and the trends depressing it are bigger than any one object-level fight in the culture war. Sterility and the end of legacy is the water we swim in and the air we breathe. Lack of issue is the curse of modernity. The trends in Bowling Alone and since the advent of the internet are only making things worse. We are slowly becoming Japan.
I understand that imagining your own child becoming a modern trans eunuch touches a nerve. I don't necessarily think it's healthy to focus on one relatively unlikely source of "castration" when society is full of these kinds of pitfalls and in much more likely forms like feminism and certain kinds of environmental activism. Parts of Western society have become a nihilistic death cult, waiting for the End and unwilling to propagate itself into the future with offspring.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
I was hoping to dig into your 2% figure here, but the linked page didn't really break things down the way I hoped.
I'd speculate that the 2% figure is a bit misleading though. There's a big difference between 2% of youth using alternate pronouns, and 2% of youth becoming de-sexed eunuchs. What percent are on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and undergo surgeries? I would suspect it's much lower than 2%. That might be a small comfort for a parent worried about the worst case scenario for their own child, but even if your child comes out as "trans" it might not be the end of your bloodline.
I'm reminded of my dad constantly checking if the front door was locked growing up. It was like a ritual to alleviate worries for him. Never mind that if an intruder was truly determined to get into our house, the front door would hardly work as a deterrent. I think it is a mistake to focus your worries too much on one angle of attack, especially one where the "average" case isn't as bad as you're imagining (insofar as a lot of "transition" for younger people is purely social.)
You should also think about whether you'd be okay with your children being "psychically castrated" in other ways as well. It would be disappointing obviously, but would you still love your children if they came to you at 18 and made it clear that they have no intention of ever having kids? Could you be happy living in the doomed world where your kids decide they would rather travel the world and party their 20's and 30's away, instead of having children or starting a family?
I think the issue is often that people are trying to smuggle in reasons why their cosmetic surgery is more important than anyone else's.
We can talk about nickname hospitality, pronoun hospitality, and the basic freedom for adult people with the money to do so to pursue elective surgeries, but that isn't where the battleground really is. The issue is much more around things like: Should government healthcare pay for hormones, surgeries, etc.? Should kids be allowed to transition? How are trans people treated when it comes to sex-segregated spaces? Is the desire to transition innate, or are there reliable ways to steer a majority of would be transitioners towards acceptance of their bodies?
People will put forward a variety of evidence and arguments about each of these points, but I think this is the fundamental difference with the other forms of body dysphoria you compare it to.
If people were pushing for breast augmentation to be standard for teenage girls with body dysphoria, I think people would be just as up in arms about it. It is only because breast augmentation is usually paid out of pocket by an adult that can afford it that it's tolerated, even if there's a stigma associated with botched plastic surgery, or obvious "fake" looks.
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