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I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
It's not going to end because um... why should it end exactly? I have this feeling of an underlying premise that there is an amount of weird that is... too weird. And... I just... don't have that premise. If something has pragmatic issues that prevent it from being pragmatic for society to support it, my first thought is "what technological advancements will cause support of this to be viable" not "lets suppress it forever."
But some people seem to see "technical advancements have caused support for this to be viable" and go into moral panic mode. Why?
Why are some people unhappy seeing the boundaries of the human condition expand? Why does it make some people uncomfortable?
What is wrong with your brains? Or is it me? What's wrong with my brain? Something is clearly wrong with someone's brain here.
How I'd describe the problem, and it's one underlying your beliefs and the beliefs of your critics, is a lack of truly considering the person. The people who criticize you consider too little, you consider too much. Your critics offer no support, why would they? What they dislike is inherently wrong, why would they consider it except to explain their reasons for disapproval? You offer too much support, why wouldn't you? You see the person, you listen to what they see they need. They live their life in their own way, almost all of them are good people, why shouldn't we support them realizing themselves? Where's the cost?
What's lacking in this discussion from reactionaries (a better term than conservatives) and progressive is the judgment of the good parent. The father who sees his child abusing a drug and finds it so obviously wrong it is only right to practice the "harsh love" of stern words and refusal to understand, let alone accommodate--he lacks good judgment. The mother who sees her child abusing a drug and enables them, it's what they say they need, it makes them happy, who's she to do anything else than show unconditional love and support? She also lacks good judgment.
You could read this as weighted against the mother, so feel free to frame it as a valid prescription used to treat a real condition. But it's a medication the child is abusing. Maybe they're getting too much and sharing with their friends, maybe they're encouraging their friends to get their own prescriptions by coaching them at faking the symptoms. Not that it's particularly hard. The American medical industry is the best in the world, the treatments developed and quality of highest care truly cannot be overstated; neither can be the depravity they are willing to indulge in pursuit of profit. There is decades of evidence proving this: they might not be the bad guys, but it is empiric falsehood to suggest they could be anything better than the neutral beneficiaries of the current climate.
This is something the father would gladly cite; this is something the mother overlooks. Neither love their child as they should.
"Harsh love" is an oxymoron. The person showing "harsh love" is either not showing love at all, what you probably think of the father I've described, or they are showing love, and it only comes across as harsh because it really is love. It's deeply and truly caring for someone, caring for what's best for them, looking for what's best for them, and knowing something they're doing might be bad for them or even disastrous. It's a concept that has been difficult to understand forever, it's what Kierkegaard wrote a book about, just trying to help people get it. It's the essential idea of what Eliezer Yudkowsky worked at with his "Coherent Extrapolated Volition." The ideal AGI is one that truly loves humanity, loves us as love is meant to be. Perceptive, understanding, upbuilding. Like the good parent.
I have a good friend who identifies as trans. This is a person who until the chrysalis exists will never pass. To use the most descriptive phrase but one they would certainly dislike, they are too much man. Too tall, too strong, too hirsute. They do have a certain androgyny in the face, insofar as so masculine a person could be in any way feminine, but it is of course the sort that accentuated their handsomeness and made them highly desirable to the biological women they have exclusively dated before and after "coming out" and beginning chemical therapy. They were told a lie by whoever first suggested they might be trans, that was a lie perpetuated to them as they fell deeper into those communities and as they specifically, and they said as much, looked for the right therapist in town: just a glorified prescription mill. That therapist wasn't doing their job, the people encouraging my friend weren't acting as friends should. They were lied to, they were told this is right. They were told this is how you support people. They don't know what's right, they don't know how to support people. They don't know what good is, they don't know what love is.
It isn't love to believe that a condition in the black box of the human brain, a condition novel within popular knowledge and largely in medical treatment, has already been cured. Humans are diverse, there are without question individuals who truly suffer from symptoms accurately described when called "gender dysphoria." Who when prescribed cross-sex hormones, who when pursuing major cosmetic surgeries to accentuate or minimize desired and undesired features, who change their names and their wardrobes and are treated as they identify, experience an abatement in those symptoms with minimal or no other psychiatric comorbidities.
There are in ever-increasing numbers individuals with serious mental illness who self-attest to gender dysphoria and are treated accordingly, as if that is the issue with them. Like my friend. My friend doesn't fall under what was once well-known in psychiatry as the "homosexual transsexual," my friend is not actually trans. Their mental illness has nothing to do with the gender dysphoria they believe they have, this is why they still struggle with it. I love my friend but not enough, I wish I loved them enough, to tell them this when they came out. To criticize what they believe they are, to appropriately indict their supposed "friends", myself now damn well included, who encouraged them or said nothing. I "supported" them and they aren't any better, and at this point I'm just hoping that when the dissonance becomes too great and finally shatters their years of rationalization, they don't commit suicide.
As you describe yourself, you would be encouraging of them. You'd be one of the ones telling a mountain of a man how the world is wrong, how the structures of man can be ignored, how we can assert the reality we wish. How he really can be a woman, we just have to force everyone to pretend hard enough. You're "supporting" his dream that for now cannot possibly be realized. And if he really does have gender dysphoria, if all his issues really are about how he was born in the wrong body, I still ask what love are you showing for the person who cannot pass when you encourage him to become something that people have a million years of evolutionary wiring conditioning them to find irreconcilably freakish?
You're not showing any. You think you are because you don't know better.
There is something we both believe. Eventually the chrysalis will exist and a man will be able to climb inside and emerge, at least superficially, as a seamless and beautiful woman. Where it'll take a DNA test or CT, if even that and surely eventually not, to be found as originally male. Where we diverge is this: you think this moment will be the great and final realization of the trans movement while I understand it will be what buries it forever.
I always caveat myself on this subject, "I don't care." You can see above how I obviously care some but I feel describing as apathetic is still closer to the truth because what side am I, exactly? I consider a lot of the discussion here on trans-advocacy as pointless, the matters settled. Short of a dark reactionary taking power, the movement isn't going away. Best learn to live with it because that's the future. But in the future, when pharmaceuticals have advanced enough to do wild things to the human body, where we can make ourselves look almost exactly as we like, we'll see the truth. We'll see so many people who believed all their problems would be solved if they could take a magic pill and wake up as an ideal form of their desired sex will do that and still have problems. It'll work for some, as experiencing the most drastic change in lifestyle possible means even those with a variety of mental issues may find their strange new reality a cure-all, but you'll see so many stories about people who discovered how fulfilling everything they thought they wanted didn't solve the problems inside their head.
It'll be sooner than that. With the rates of kids having delayed puberty and altered puberty for identified gender, combined with advances in cosmetic surgery, novel tissue generation and implantation, the various tech being explored right now to change how voices sound, we're approaching a point where there are going to be many people who pass seamlessly enough as the sex they thought they were. Probably not 5 years, 10, 15 at the most, and those stories will come pouring out.
"It's not what was wrong with me. I wish the people who pushed me into it, or who helped me along, thinking they were loving me, thinking they were supporting me, knew better."
Love is making it hard but not impossible for people to follow this life path. Love is not cruel dismissal and hatred. Love is accepting some people really are this way and and supporting them. Love is also understanding how we do not know how the brain works and so we will not indulge the I-cannot-modify-enough, the astonishingly unparalleled, sheer fucking hubris of unquestioningly believing the cure has already been found. Love is exhausting every option before extreme body modification becomes the chosen path. Love is putting every physician and therapist who treats this and absolutely the pharma that makes money from this under the largest lens to ensure they aren't abusing and unrighteously profiting from their position. Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there. Love is knowing "This is who I am" is not a magic phrase, it's knowing people get things wrong, especially when it comes to themselves. Love isn't blindly supporting what a person thinks is best for themselves, it's knowing and standing firm on what's actually best for them. Love is the good parent.
Would you see this as a preferred outcome?
You have to be the change you want to see.
the preferred outcome is whatever allows the tech i describe to develop uninterrupted. that tech is connected with advancing human simulacra, and simulacra will probably be the key to keeping humanity from destroying itself long enough for us to develop the further necessary tech to pass through the great filter.
This is a fascinating thought, would love to hear a fuller explanation in another post.
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I don't have much to say to this because I agree with too much of it.
Bury is a strange word to use but yes. There will be no movement after that. There will just be people whose problems were solved by the chrysalis and people who learned that they had a different problem that the chrysalis failed to solve. When transformation is trivial it becomes the diagnosis.
But I also agree that transformation is not trivial today. It is a process with costs. You say I consider the person too much. But what you describe is a scenario where I consider what they say, but still fail to see them. Until the chrysalis is a trivial procedure... I agree. The person needs to be understood in full. But this is not easy. For someone to be seen they have to be known and loved. And the person who sees them needs to have insight that exceeds that of what even they know of themselves. Or able to guide them through unraveling and exploring their own motivations and experiences.
We need more passive mentors with more time and more insight than what many parents are de facto able to provide.
I am compelled again to stop posting and continue working on my assistant. We don't need AGI for this. AI should suffice.
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