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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   39459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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So I recently noticed that my state has quietly removed the word "mother" from every official documentation I've seen, replacing it with "birthing parent" or some other euphemism. Iirc Colorado has already switched its language the same way, as have most Dem-run states.

Wasn't it only a few months ago we were told this was an insane conspiracy theory and only a few weirdos would ever try to abolish "mother"? Now it's been done so neatly and without fuss or any sign of resistance. Things that only last year would have sounded like insane paranoid delusions just... Happen with unanimous support.

What is there to even say? The insanity keeps coming so fast they hardly need to gaslight you any more. Has anyone here been "corrected" for saying the M-word yet?

Remember ten years ago, when a canonical demand made by "geek feminists" was for nerdy men to stop referring to women as "females", because it's creepy, clinical and alienating? And now these same geek feminists are demanding that we refer to women as "menstruators", "chestfeeders" and "birthing people". Anyone else find that weird?

It's not about the words, it's about the power to force others to change their behavior. It's never about the words.

The term "white males" is too commonly in use for me to think that demands about "females" are sincere.

Depends on if you mean "sincere" or if you actually mean "consistent." In my experience progressives seem to genuinely believe what they are saying, but white men are at the top of the progressive stack and thus have no right to feel offended whereas women do.

I've started to think that very often they literally don't know what they're saying. I've listened quietly to some arguments where a leftist started responding with party line chanting, and when I talk to them privately about it a month later they act surprised and embarrassed at having their words quoted back to them.
I've literally heard them say "I would never say that" about things they literally posted in print in 2020.

Been trying to write a post about it without explicitly saying "I'm not sure my opponents are conscious human beings"

It's not that they aren't conscious. It's that the purpose of words is different for them. If you're honest with yourself, not everything you say has the simple purpose of "conveying information I believe to be true" either. For some people this is never the purpose of words.

chestfeeders

Which is also superfluous! 'Breast' was already gender-neutral once; a suit of armour had a breast-plate, not a 'chest-plate'. The sternum didn't stop being a 'breast-bone' when it was in a male skeleton.

The gendered term was 'teat'; as in, "If you want your baby to grow up strong and healthy, you have to give it plenty t'eat."

There’s also some Celebration Parallax in the mix: “That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is.”

Replacing “mothers” with “birthing persons” is a totally brave and stunning practice if you’re supportive of it, otherwise it’s but a paranoid rightwing conspiracy theory.

Sure, when progressives call women “bodies with vaginas” they get an “awww, how sweet,” but when I do it I get a “hello, human resources?!” Hmph… ruuude.

Relevant turn of phrase: 'bonus hole' to refer to vagina https://www.jostrust.org.uk/professionals/health-professionals/nurse-gp/trans-non-binary/language

IMO it reveals a lot. Misogynists call women sluts, bitches, whores and foids but do acknowledge their femininity, even if they don't like how it's expressed. Or they call them mannish/girlbosses, attacking insufficient femininity. Birthing Persons and Bonus hole strips even that away.

What the fuck people actually say ‘bonus hole’?

I still don't get that glossary page. I have seen 'bonus hole' used in the wild in trans-adjacent spaces, but entirely porn ones, and usually ones that are pretty clearly kinking off the whole 'it's Very Manly to use the crudest and objectifying language possible'. BonusHoleBoys (unfortunately now defunct) was about the most humanistic take on those tropes (cw: though still extremely gay), and it was still very heavily set around how hot the subs were rather than how hard they could be used.

Compare c---boy, including the bit where that's being increasingly driven out from more general-interest communities (so much as furry porn sites can be general-interest) in favor of more clinical terms.

((Though I have seen trans men more comfortable with the c-word than with 'vagina' IRL. And it's not like 'front hole', for a more common one, is better in terms of mouth feel or specificity.))

Maybe in the specific context of gyno checkups trans men are more comfortable using that sort of terminology? I have no idea what norms in that sort of medical environment are like; the cis male equivalents are... uh, weird to use as analogy.

To be fair, it doesn't seem that "bonus hole" (🤢) is intended for use by women.

The "not happening and it's good that it is" bingo board entry has that perfect toxoplasmic nature where it takes a very common combination of opinions that is just human nature and skews it just a little bit in order to produce a great net effect of making the outgroup look nastier. Most of the time, what they actually believe amounts to "this would be good if it happened, but there is no way it is happening because things are going terribly for me and my tribe" - delusional and paranoid maybe, but not the gloating and gaslighting that the other side wants to see in it. It makes little sense for people to strut around like Optimate master-morality winners when their whole worldview and moral self-esteem depends on them being virtuous slave-morality losers.

I feel like some of the "celebration paradox" could come down to nuance around what is considered to be a specific thing happening.

I could see something like:

  • Person A: X is happening, and in my opinion X is bad.
  • Person B: No, X is not happening. X', a different thing, is happening, and X' is good.

In this case, Person A may either consider X' to be basically the same thing as X, and so feel like Person B is basically saying, "X is not happening, but it totally is and that's good."

I feel like a good instance of this would be:

  • Person A: I'm worried about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria creating a generation of sterilized, lifelong medical dependents in society.
  • Person B: The evidence of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is fairly weak. But there has been a rise in trans people for different reasons than those proposed by the ROGD hypothesis, and that's a good thing because it means more people are living authentically and feel safe enough to be out as trans.

I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection. I suspect that most people raising concerns about ROGD specifically are actually concerned more generally about the rise in trans people, and are happy to go to fringe theories to justify that concern. But if ROGD had never been conceptualized, it would have been another fringe theory, since trans skepticism has to be skeptical of the "mainstream medical opinion" of organizations like the APA.

Basically, if you don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities, you are going to rely on fringe sources. You see the same thing happening in reverse with trans activists and the Cass Review.

I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection.

But like, either X is happening/happened or it isn't. If I assert "for fear of being accused of being racist, multiple police departments in English towns independently decided not to investigate Pakistani grooming gangs for years", that is a factual statement which must be judged accordingly. Asserting that I'm only bringing it up to foment anti-immigration hysteria (or criticise Islam) has no bearing on the simple factual question of whether I'm describing events that really happened, or describing them accurately and fairly - even if I really am only bringing it up to foment anti-immigration hysteria. Transparent Bulverism. The fact that I may have ulterior motives/a hidden agenda for mentioning a factually true statement does not in any way undermine the truth of said statement.

Uh, is ROGD fringe? I thought it was a topic which made pro-trans doctors uncomfortable but was documented as a thing.

It seems somewhere like autogynophilia. There's definitely people who suddenly have Revelations about their gender -- even in trans communities, 'cracking the egg' is a metaphor for a reason, and before the 2010s people with long histories of gender stuff realizing that it's even a category -- but just as AGP-as-a-theory is more than 'some trans people get off on dressing up at some point', ROGD-as-a-theory is more than 'some people become trans rapidly'.

Exactly what it is, well, that's harder to nail down: there's no ROGD-Blanchard or ROGD-Bailey, even pointed to literally Bailey gets you kinda vague mutterisms (about cults, because he's nothing if not unpersuasive). That people who come out as trans in younger generations tend to have a lot of other trans people in their social circles and either did not have or obfuscated a lot of gender stuff before identifying publicly as trans is pretty uncontroversial; that they're doing it because of those social circles is really hard to measure and the data is messy; that it's just a phase for a large portion and they'd be happier not transitioning or likely to detransition (which not all ROGD advocates are suggesting!) may not even be measurable in a perfect world.

that it's even a category

I have no idea what point this comic is trying to make. Unrelatedly, I absolutely hate how this CAD-adjacent muck is the default art style for all Western webcomics. Cyanide and Happiness is unironically more expressive and aesthetically pleasing than this.

El Goonish Shive is a long (loooooong)-running transformation and especially gender-transformation comic. The character on the right has spent a little over a year in-universe and around twelve years real-world being declared Just That Girly and having access to a magical (well, alien magic science) transformation gun regularly used to change gender. This was a bit of a Genre in that era of the internet, complete with sometimes not-exactly-kosher-by-modern-progressive-standard jokes. Unlike most of that Genre, the same comic has continued mostly uninterrupted for the whole time.

The timeline for the comic is weird and kinda alternate universe, but it's probably set somewhere between 2005 and 2012, with a world mostly like ours, but where magic is weakly available. While there are a lot of other bigger questions that the availability of magic set up, though, that alien magic science transformation gun is a little unusual in-setting for having both extreme reliability, mass production, and having some real-world uses, without being especially dangerous in terms of side effects or weaponization. (The gun itself can make disguises, but a stripped down version that just changes primary and secondary gender traits can be produced in minutes.)

Which produces a problem because it's something the character basically never considered, even as the author was increasingly getting bombarded with questions about why he wasn't actively working toward it, because after the first decade of a gender transformation comic you tend to pick up a trans fanbase, and the comic as a whole was and remains pretty unusual for almost everybody being mostly sane, reasonable, and compassionate.

The explanation that people didn't realize that was a possibility handles at least part of that, albeit by making the question suddenly relevant. And, indeed, the author didn't know, back in 2003 (cw: bad art).

((The character on the left is a lab experiment who escaped after a superpowered nutjob who may or may not have been a competing test subject took over the lab, but there's plot reasons she has surface-level familiarity with the topic.))

Ok, but I'm even more confused now than I was before.

IIRC, ROGD was coined as a sort of proposed explanation to the sudden massive increase to people claiming to be trans. With this, a study was conducted interviewing parents who believed their children had suddenly come out. Liberals proposed alternate explanations for the observations - the children may not have told their parents until recently, and the study may have recruited participants who were anti-trans to begin with. This, to progressives, means that the study has been "debunked." In addition, the study was pulled for not getting the correct disclosure - it asked if they were okay with publicly using their name, but not if they were okay with using their name in a study. This incredible distinction of course meant the study was completely unethical.

The study was never meant to conclusively prove ROGD was real, simply that it might be worth studying. Of course, no one really attempted to follow up.

Take it with a grain of salt, but the Wikipedia article for ROGD currently opens:

Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a controversial, scientifically unsupported hypothesis which claims that some adolescents identify as transgender and experience gender dysphoria due to peer influence and social contagion. ROGD is not recognized as a valid mental health diagnosis by any major professional association, which discourage its use due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence for the concept, major methodological issues in existing research, and its stigmatization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Which at least seems like a decent indicator that ROGD is currently considered a fringe position, since once the dust is settled most Wikipedia articles tend towards whatever is considered "mainstream" opinion of experts over time.

Doesn't mean that ROGD isn't true, just that it is considered fringe.

On the transgender issue in particular, Wikipedia seems fully ideologically captured by radical trans activists. On the article about women, the third sentence explains that women are only "typically" of the female sex (meaning at least some women are not female), and the fourth paragraph is entirely about trans women.

I actually think the Wikipedia page on women walks a fair line on the topic. The very first sentence uses "adult female human" as its core definition, and the second paragraph starts:

Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and fertile women are capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause.

I don't view the use of the word "typically" here the way you do. I think it is an appropriate amount of nuance for a reference work, since it makes room for discussion of intersex women. Now, I acknowledge that there's various decisions about how and when to include references to atypical examples in an encyclopedia, but I maintain that including mention of intersex women somewhere in the article about women is appropriate. Given the article's sections:

  • Etymology
  • Terminology
  • Biology
  • Sexuality and gender
  • Health
  • Femininity
  • History
  • Culture and gender roles
  • Clothing, fashion and dress codes
  • Fertility and family life
  • Education
  • Government and politics
  • Science, literature and art
  • Gender symbol

I could see the argument for keeping discussion of intersex women to the biology section, and creating a subsection for trans women under Culture and gender roles or something. But I don't really think that the Wikipedia article on the whole screams "captured by trans activists" to me.

But I don't really think that the Wikipedia article on the whole screams "captured by trans activists" to me.

Does it whisper?

Does it wink?

Is it, in fact, captured, silently or with thunderous pronouncement?

The whole point of Reliable Sources is that they provide plausible deniability to smuggle your assumptions into the article, then engage in bureaucratic warfare to keep it that way.

Doesn't mean that ROGD isn't true, just that it is considered fringe.

Considered fringe by who, and whose sources?

I don't think ROGD is fringe at all, and I don't trust Wikipedia when they say it is. I think it's an obvious explanation for some very baffling behavior, but that explanation isn't allowed on Wikipedia.

Gonna have to disagree with you. While you're correct that the article is right to acknowledge the existence of intersex women, the language around trans women screams ideological capture to me, such as the use of the phrase "assigned male at birth". Sex is not "assigned". A male baby born in an unsupervised natural birth in which the mother (excuse me, "birthing person") dies in childbirth without ever laying eyes on her child remains male, in spite of the fact that no sex was ever "assigned" to him by anyone. Humans are not subject to Schrödinger's chromosomes, both male and female until directly observed, and it takes a remarkable level of Butlerian solipsism to even consider the possibility.

This demonstrates the motte-and-bailey fallacy at the heart of the trans movement. They insist that they're not trying to collapse the distinction between male and female people, of course they recognise that sex exists, they're just arguing that something called gender identity also exists. But if that's the case, why are they so keen to insist that males are not "male" but simply "assigned male at birth"? Is "this baby is male" not a factually and uncontroversially true statement about a baby born with a penis, Y chromosome etc.? Why are you trying to water this definition down by using language that implies a mistake was made somewhere?

such as the use of the phrase "assigned male at birth"

I believe that was originally a term used for intersex people; the transgender activists appropriated it.

That’s only true if by “fringe” you mean “politically unpopular with the left.” Wikipedia is notorious for its leftward bias on politically sensitive topics. You can generally trust Wikipedia on non-CW topics, but certainly not on a subject as controversial as transgenderism.

Person B: No, X is not happening. X', a different thing, is happening, and X' is good.

I think what usually happens is Motte and Bailey shenanigans where this is the Motte, and the Bailey is split among "people who think X is happening are insane conspiracy theorists" and "X'' is good (where X'' is superficially distinct from X to enable this argument but similar enough that people would object to it for the exact same reasons)"

The sane reasonable people honestly endorse the Motte and have good arguments for why it makes sense, and then they side themselves with and defend the Bailey people who aren't actually endorsing the same principle, and the Bailey people obfuscate and point to whichever snippets of Motte argument made by other people support their current argument.

I feel like some of the "celebration paradox" could come down to nuance around what is considered to be a specific thing happening.

I don't see how this can explain it at all. "Adding context" is one of the most common deboonking tactics employed by progressive fact-checkers, and other discourse-participators. If they could take an anti-trans statement, and explain how it's all an oversimplification stemming from ignorance and bigotry, and how a pro-trans statement is the thing that thoughtful and educated people should believe, Vox, Snopes, etc. would be off to the races. What I've seen instead in this conversation is blanket denial and trying to smear the reputation of opponents. Any attempt at a nuanced explanation only comes after the blanket denials have been issues, and the evidence to the contrary becomes undeniable.

I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection.

If you're going to question someone's motives, you should do so directly, rather playing the "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is" game.

But if ROGD had never been conceptualized, it would have been another fringe theory, since trans skepticism has to be skeptical of the "mainstream medical opinion" of organizations like the APA.

Basically, if you don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities, you are going to rely on fringe sources. You see the same thing happening in reverse with trans activists and the Cass Review.

First of all, this part is a bit confusing, what does it have to do with this "celebration parallax"? Secondly, I'm pretty damn contrarian / anti-authority, and even I wouldn't say that I "don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities", rather I don't believe authority determines truth. Finally, I don't see the symmetry here. When you brought the trans community's criticism of the Cass Review, saying it unfairly rejected studies by insisting on an impossible to meet double-blind RCT standard, we didn't do the "it's not happening, and it's a good thing that it is" bit, we just said "it's not happening" and sent you the evidence.

Secondly, I'm pretty damn contrarian / anti-authority, and even I wouldn't say that I "don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities", rather I don't believe authority determines truth.

Right, I agree. Authoritativeness-fringeness is orthogonal to truthfulness. Fringe things sometimes turn out to be true, authoritative things sometimes turn out to be false. Continental drift was a fringe theory until it wasn't.

My larger point was more about what people tend to do when they feel like what the authorities are saying doesn't make sense, and decide to do their own independent investigation. Existing fringe theories form a Schelling point for the people rejecting authorities on a particular point, since it is often hard to build original theories and syntheses of one's own. As an example, I've always found Blanchard's typology incomplete and inadequate. It's not that I think autogynephilic and "homosexual" transsexuals don't exist, but that I'm fairly certain there are at least one or two other categories that exist as well (especially in the modern queer community.) People who believe in Blanchard's typology as a complete explanation of transness often remind me of Karl Popper's criticism of Adlerian psychoanalysis:

As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.'

I could easily replace the references to Adlerian constructs with reference to "AGP." Heck, we even have /u/KMC doing it in this very thread. I don't know how people who have never met the person under discussion, have never tried to get to know their thoughts or why they transitioned are so sure that they know the person masturbates in women's clothing. It feels like AGP-totalizers take advantage of the fact that there will usually be silence about a person's sex life due to social mores, and fill in the gap with whatever best fits their preconceptions.

I'm fairly willing to accept that some number of "trans" people are AGPs who lie to fit the most acceptable societal narrative, but I'm less willing to assume that literally every trans person who transitions later in life is one of them. Especially because, for every seeming confirmation of AGP online when people are speaking candidly, there is always a chorus of people saying, "Eh, I've considered the AGP and HSTS hypotheses, and I think I've actually transitioned for reason X", where X is something completely plausible as a component of human psychology and desire.

My larger point was more about what people tend to do when they feel like what the authorities are saying doesn't make sense, and decide to do their own independent investigation. Existing fringe theories form a Schelling point for the people rejecting authorities on a particular point, since it is often hard to build original theories and syntheses of one's own.

I pretty much agree about Blanchard. To the extent I talk about it, it's mostly the mirror image of your objection - I keep hearing how it's discredited, pseudoscientific, and whatnot, while the most I could see in any substantial criticism is that it's incomplete. If incompleteness is the objection from the start, I have no issues with it.

But I still don't see your broader point. I could quibble with your interpretation of the examples you gave - I don't think ROGD was a preexisting fringe theory, rather it's an academic formalization of an already existing idea. When a 12 year old declares they're trans and want to go on hormones, thoughts like "are the friends you're hanging out with putting some goofy ideas in your head?" are the most intuitive and natural to pop into a parents' heads, no one needed Littman for that. In fact, the entire criticism of her study boils down to her recruiting from mommy forums where these conversations where already taking place, thus biasing her sample.

I could also question the idea that what you're describing is descriptive only / mostly of people rejecting authority. In my opinion the mainstream authorities also rely on fringe theories as a schelling point in exactly the way you described. You might protest that how can a theory be both fringe and endorsed by mainstream authorities? To which I'd point out that the majority of the world still thinks the whole "gender identity" theory is academic gobbledygook, and a basic question about definitions, even from a meathead like Matt Walsh, can reduce said mainstream authorities to a blubbering mess.

But more importantly I don't see the point of your argument at all. What are the consequences on the conversation if you're correct vs. if you're wrong? I don't see what relevant conclusion I can draw in either case, but maybe I'm missing something.

In Washington state we get mailers from the state public health agency to tell us how to raise our babies. They use the term "chestfeeding."

We have chestfeeding at home.

I've encountered this a few times in medical contexts, such as being asked about my gender when in a hospital, about to give birth, and "birthing parent" language. I think also on some insurance documents. It seemed pretty dumb, I would expect a dedicated trans man to avoid giving birth. That was over two years ago.

I mean, trans men don’t seem to want to actually be, you know, men. They seem to want to not be women.

That makes it less likely that they’d give birth even compared to, say, lesbians, but for someone who really drank the gender kool aid- which by definition these people are prone too- it’s probably not too much of a stretch. And progressives in general are not shy about catering to tiny subsets of a tiny subset of the population.

I don't think that the actual intent is as much serving trans men as it is serving lesbian couples who, presumably, would have two parents who want to be called mothers.

In that case one of them could be referred to as the "birthing mother": two mothers, only one of whom actually gestated the child in question.

I guess that the fluent use of IT systems would then require applying the designation of "birthing mother" to everyone who has given birth, which would mean that presumably you'd then have a lot of form with "father" and "birthing mother".

IF(parent1.sex = "female" AND parent2.sex = "female")

{set "parent1" to "Birthing mother",set "parent2" to "Mother"}

ELSE{set "parent1" to "Mother", set "parent2" to "Father}

Add the designation of "siring father" while we're at it.

"I'm not the siring father, I'm the father that stepped up."

Although, now that you mention it, I could see it having something to do with the rise of surrogacy, where the surrogate mother is sidelined. I remember some uncomfortable pictures a while back with gay men celebrating their upcoming baby, and the surrogate mother standing awkwardly behind them like some Handmaid's Tale character.

Why would a lesbian be bothered by just listing two mothers, and identifying which is the biological mother for medical history reasons? That seems very easy, like it would involve more use of "mother," not less.

I would expect a dedicated trans man to avoid giving birth.

Think again.

Huh. Hadn't heard of... um... him.

Wasn't it only a few months ago we were told this was an insane conspiracy theory and only a few weirdos would ever try to abolish "mother"?

To be clear, nobody actually wants to abolish the words "mother" or "woman." They want to use them in what they assert is "correct" manner, i.e. to refer to parents or people who personally identify as women, irrespective of sex. Conversely, terms like "birthing parent" and "people with uteruses" are used specifically because they include trans men, and are intended to be used only in contexts in which those characteristics are relevant.

For example, "Birthing Parent's Day" is mostly a GC meme. Trans activists are, to the best of my knowledge, not particularly interested in renaming Mother's and Father's day, because they still see "Mother" and "Father" as totally valid terms as long as they're used in a manner consistent with self-ID and not with biological sex. Trans men who have given birth would, for the most part, rather be honored on Father's Day than on a renamed Mother's Day, and vice-versa for trans women.

If you ignore the ideological aspect and the silliness of the phrasing, there's a certain set-theoretic elegance to it.

To be clear, nobody actually wants to abolish the words "mother" or "woman." They want to use them in what they assert is "correct" manner, i.e. to refer to parents or people who personally identify as women, irrespective of sex.

By the way in Hegelian jargon it is exactly what is meant by abolish, which just a translation of the word aufheben. The idea is that we are not abolishing the thing, we are just "enriching" and "transforming" the meaning of contradictions in binaries such as man/woman. This is the idea behind other leftist/social justice utopian thinking: we want to abolish the police by resolving contradictions and making police unnecessary under proper Social Justice. We want to abolish private property, because under communism there is no longer need for such a thing.

If you ignore the ideological aspect and the silliness of the phrasing, there's a certain set-theoretic elegance to it.

If you ignore ideological aspects, then we would not be here in the first place. There is no set-theoretic elegance to confuse meaning of words such as using the same word of "woman" for both a female member of homo sapiens and some invented concept of self-ID gender: you would use a different string for such a thing, let's say "transwoman"? The same with regards to removing the word "breast" as a female organ with milk ducts from our vocabulary altogether just because someone's ideology is offended by it. I don't see any elegance in removing valid concepts that describe biological reality, just deliberate confusion.

I've heard this a lot, sometimes phrased as something like "well, 'birthing person' or 'menstruator' are more precise and accurate terms than 'mother' or 'woman', because #notallwomen menstruate, and some people who menstruate don't self-identify as women".

On the one hand, yes, strictly speaking I suppose the term "menstruator" is more "precise" than "woman". On the other hand, don't bullshit me - you're not promoting the use of this term because it's more precise or accurate than the previous standard. There are plenty of factually accurate assertions which have been known to drive trans activists into violent rages and/or floods of tears. A trans woman can't complain that it's extremely dysphoria-inducing to be described as "male", or for it to be pointed out that trans women are just as likely to be violent as cis men - and then turn around and say "we're just trying to use more accurate and precise language!"

It's also not even clear that this sort of precision is worth chasing. Just consider how many more people there are who speak English as a second language than are trans (this has already potentially caused questions about the UK census)

Put aside that. It is just ugly brutalizing language.

In my last job, the head of marketing was trying to get us to put our preferred pronouns in our email signatures (something which is very much not common practice in this country). I was very opposed and told her so, pointing out that there were (to my knowledge) no trans or non-binary people on staff, but plenty of first-generation Polish, Romanian and Brazilian migrants, for the majority of whom the concept of "preferred pronouns" is alien, and who would most likely feel confused and excluded by such a policy. I argued that it seemed like very skewed priorities indeed, to roll out a policy with the goal of making hypothetical future employees feel more included - at the cost of making current staff members feel more excluded.

You know, the traditional answer to this is probably putting the appropriate honorific with your name in the signature. It (in most cases) answers what pronouns you prefer, and although English is my native tongue, in the foreign languages I've studied, honorifics generally show up pretty quickly, for uses like how to refer your teacher.

Sincerely,

Mr. Vexillologist

So we're right back to Chesterton's fence/jugaad, as usual.

If the only options on the table were he/him and she/her (Incidentally, why isn't possesive specified? A sufficiently gender dysphoric person could feel she/them/his is the only accurate way to refer to them. His feelings would be hard argue against, in a society in which primacy is placed upon self-ID. She would have an easy way to articulate his desires.), but it would just be a longer way of saying man or woman.

Once he/them, she/them, they/them, he/her, they/her, she/him, they/him enter the mix, depending on how much declension the native language of the foreigner has, the ESL-er get comfused and make more mistakes.

Never mind the ESL-er, I can’t make hide nor hair of mixed pronouns, and I’ve spoken English all my life. What does “she/them” even actually do for anyone, other than get her them outsized attention? Neopronouns I at least sort of understand, even if I find them ridiculous and annoying. But mixing and matching? That’s just obnoxious.

At least one explanation I've seen that it tries to convey that it's ok to use both she/her and they/them. Presumably there's a bunch of potential ways it's used.

My brother's girlfriend was using she/them for awhile, and I asked exactly this question. Her response was something to the effect that she was trying to convey that, while she was certainly a woman, she wasn't like a woman-woman. (Perform your own diagnosis of notlikeothergirls.jpeg/pickme/internalised misogyny here.) More specifically, she hoped that if she was in a foreign country with more rigid gender roles, that introducing herself with mixed pronouns would help to convey the idea that she doesn't fully adhere to certain expectations of how women are supposed to behave.

I pointed out that the people in said countries aren't going to give a shit about how she "identifies", and will simply clock her as female and treat her accordingly. Progressive Anglophone nations are literally the only parts of the world in which "I identify as X" is even understood by a meaningful proportion of the population, never mind respected. She seemed to sort of recognise that I had a point, if begrudgingly.

This conversation was probably two years ago. My brother said she isn't really insistent on the mixed pronouns and never demands that people refer to her as such in conversation. It literally only comes up when prompted for her pronouns on a social media or professional network.

notlikeothergirls.jpeg/pickme

Still don't understand these two memes. I see them everywhere and I still just don't get it.

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Even worse, pronouns are for when you talk about someone, not to them, so they really make no sense. They're for identification of a third party between you and someone else, the third party's feelings about what you call them are largely irrelevant because they're generally not even present when pronouns are used.

This seems completely backwards to me. Preferred pronouns are if anything more useful when interacting between cultures because I often don't know what the implied gender of foreign names is. Sure it's also useful if gender-non-conforming people prefer "they" or not, but that's certainly not what I'm learning from the gender labels in my work directory info.

If I'm a native English speaker who is familiar with the "preferred pronouns" convention and what it entails, if I receive an email from someone from a foreign culture and I'm uncertain of whether they're a man or a woman, their choice to include their preferred pronouns in their email signature will absolutely be helpful. Even if I'm a native English speaker who was never formally trained about preferred pronouns and what they entail, I'll probably be able to infer from context.

By contrast, if I'm a Romanian or Pole who only very recently migrated to an Anglophone country, who has a very weak grasp of the English language, is wholly unfamiliar with woke shibboleths, and who has just received an email from someone whose gender he is uncertain of - I struggle to imagine that that person including their preferred pronouns in their email signature would be terribly enlightening. In that person's position, I would likely assume that "Preferred pronouns: they/them" is just a component of that person's job title, or one of their professional qualifications, or a means by which to contact them (you know, the only stuff that we thought was appropriate to include in a professional email signature before ~10 years ago, and which is still the case outside of the Anglosphere).

Your argument, about the implied gender of foreign names, builds the case for traditional pronouns, not preferred pronouns.

I think it depends on if you're operating in a mostly text or a mostly in person environment.

In person, "traditional pronouns" are probably best. Over text and when people from many cultures are interacting, preferred pronouns probably work best.

What exactly is the difference between stating your "traditional" and "preferred" pronouns in your email signature? A traditional pronoun set matches your original name just as well as your preferred pronoun set matches your original or newly chosen name.

Is it just the slash mark between nominative and accusative?

Traditional pronouns align with biological sex. Preferred pronouns may not, leading to a surprise when "she" turns out to be a man in a dress.

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This seems completely backwards to me. Preferred pronouns are if anything more useful when interacting between cultures because I often don't know what the implied gender of foreign names is.

This would only be useful for someone for whom getting a 3rd party's gender correct when referring to them with pronouns is a meaningful priority. For many non-native English or other similar language speakers, that's just not all that important, in part because their own native language lacks gender for those pronouns. E.g. my Korean-born parents, to this day, 30+ years after immigrating to the USA, freely use female pronouns to refer to straightforward run-of-the-mill cis males and vice versa, only caring to correct themselves if it's pointed out, and considering it mainly as a trivial verbal typo that they can't be arsed to discriminate between the gendered pronouns.

So if you already have a team that's full of people who have bought into the notion that getting someone's pronouns correct ("correct" can refer either to their self-ID or to what the speaker perceives as their gender or any other criterion by which we can determine that the pronoun's gender is consistent with the person's gender) is a priority worth pursuing, then having a standard of everyone sharing their pronouns first certainly could be more useful to first-generation foreign employees; however, it seems that first-generation foreign employees often tend not to prioritize such things as much as native-born employees.

So you use 'they' until the person you're interacting with reveals themselves. Teams texts, a Skype call, or a company headshot usually takes care of this.

I work with a lot of fellow, foreign employees, and I swear that there has never been any enduring confusion over somebody's gender or sex. Yes, an odd-to-my-ears name occasionally stumps me, and this is often rectified within 24-48 hours just by inference, without anybody prompting for pronouns or confirming genitals. Furthermore, most of the people I'm interacting with do not have not have these models for novel gender theory born from the West. They work for a US company, so on some level they 'get' why it's being asked (because despite DEI and inclusions practices, everybody is bowing down to American corporate culture), but I have a hard time imagining them getting utility from this on a more fundamental level.

On paper, I get the argument you're making. In my reality, 99% of the company folk I see with pronouns in their signatures or profiles visibly match their birth sex. There is no confusion or ambiguity regarding who or what they are. And this generalizes across all the Americans, Indians, Koreans, Serbians, and more that I see listed in my recent Teams history.

The one time I have ever experienced a 'pronoun snag' was with a goateed male with a generic dude name like 'Doug', and even he preferred the ambiguous 'they'. I believe that this entire concotion of modern gender theory fused with HR nannying is for his benefit, not poor people across the pond struggling with language barriers.

The only context I can imagine not knowing the sex of one of your colleagues being a problem is if you've been emailing someone back and forth and you agree to meet in person: "I'll meet you just outside the conference room at 3pm", and you don't know who to look for. But this can easily be rectified by:

  • A blanket policy of including the person's staff photo in their email signature, which many companies already have
  • A staff directory which includes staff photos, which many companies already have
  • The person telling you who to look for: "I'll meet you just outside the conference room at 3pm, I'll be wearing a red scarf." (which they would probably do anyway even if their name was unambiguously gendered and their staff photo was in their email signature)

It’s sad that “Progressive Policies R the Real Exclusionary Ones” is the only card to play in such situations, unless one wants to risk getting /r/byebyejob’d.

And your standing would had been so much weaker without the presence of your Brazilian migrant colleagues for the usual ipdol reasons.

When we spoke, it wasn't the only argument I made, but I did suspect that the "fifty Stalins" one would have the greatest impact.

Push this hard enough and sometimes you can get to the true justification (before your ignominious exit): it's the trans/NB people they care about, not anyone else.

They don't want them abolished they just want them replaced.

and are intended to be used only in contexts in which those characteristics are relevant.

I think this is actually, factually, wrong in the real world. It is used in all contexts because it is (incorrectly) seen as less offensive to call a woman a chestfeeder than to remind a man that he doesn't have breasts, and cannot breastfeed. Plus, when you're printing pamphlets, you don't print out one for the normies and one for the weirdos, you set your standards of language and then you print one pamphlet, and those are the words everyone sees.

By the way, this is similar to how Pride and Juneteenth are being used to unseat the 4th of July here in America. I'm not happy about it, and I won't be lied to about it happening in front of me.

I don’t think Juneteenth is unseating 4th of July. I think it’s unseating Father’s Day, cue jokes about blacks needing something to celebrate too, but Juneteenth isn’t a July 4 tier holiday and the two are in close proximity in a way it’s not near July 4.

That first year Juneteenth was a federal holiday, it was the exact same day as Father's Day. It's like the feds were daring us to notice.

Yes, the feds purposefully enforced the emancipation proclamation on June 19th in order to overlap with father's day once a decade.

Or, perhaps they purposefully triggered the summer of love because the overlap was coming up.

Why celebrate the occupation and not the declaration? 4th of July celebrates a purely formal act, and not when the British lost control of anything.

It was originally a local holiday on the gulf coast in Texas, which seems eminently reasonable. Why pick this one and not one of what I’m sure are a dozen other local African American holidays I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable arbitrary decision to make.

It seems that it was initially a niche holiday in certain parts of Texas, so maybe that's why they cared about the emancipation of Texas.

I agree with this criticism, but it’s worth noting that the declaration was in December, which is already pretty holiday-heavy, and which doesn’t have the best weather in most of the country. Whereas most people would welcome an extra day off in June, which didn’t previously have any federal holidays.

Juneteenth doesn’t celebrate the emancipation proclamation. It celebrates occupying troops taking possession of Galveston.

It celebrates the enforcement of the proclamation, as I said.

Father's Day isn't a federal holiday. Nobody is getting a day off work for Father's Day, but they do for Juneteenth, and in the corporate world, that means it usually unseats something else. I get MLK Day off, but not George Washington's birthday, as another example.

What workplace gives Juneteenth off instead of July 4?

None, yet. I don't think they started with MLK day, either, but it sure did turn out that way eventually.

seen as less offensive to call a woman a chestfeeder than to remind a man that he doesn't have breasts, and cannot breastfeed.

No, that's not why. "Chestfeeding" was coined for the benefit of trans men and enbies who don't want the word "breasts" being used to describe their breasts because they associate it with femininity.

TWs will talk all day long about how they can (sometimes, kind of, with pharmaceutical assistance) breastfeed. They love having breasts, and they love calling them breasts.

I'm not speaking as an apologist here. I'm just saying that the idea that they want to abolish words like "mother" and "woman" is not based on an accurate understanding of gender ideology. They want to redefine these words.

less offensive to call a woman a chestfeeder than to remind a man that he doesn't have breasts, and cannot breastfeed

Oh, I thought it was to avoid reminding women who are breastfeeding but identify as male that they do have breasts. Which always seemed like it must be a rare request. Like how many women feeding their baby using their breasts, who certainly can feel what's happening, still get psychic psychic relief from not acknowledging that it's a breast?

These people’s framing of what it means to be a man or a woman is so different from normal people’s that it’s blue and orange morality. But crucially you can’t have both in the public square, because their idea of what a woman or man is entails everyone else going along with their deluded self ID.

As a society we have to pick one or the other. This isn’t a whatever floats your boat issue, not really. The commons belongs to someone and your gender is in the commons.

Good point, I think I got the type of offense to be avoided backwards.

For example, "Birthing Parent's Day" is mostly a GC meme. Trans activists are, to the best of my knowledge, not particularly interested in renaming Mother's and Father's day, because they still see "Mother" and "Father" as totally valid terms as long as they're used in a manner consistent with self-ID and not with biological sex.

This strikes me as kinda sanewashing or bad-faith. It's tough not to tie the effort to technically rename mothers as "Birthing Parents" to broader, largely left-coded, efforts to expand Mother's day to include non-mothers, or to avoid offending non-mothers. The NYT and such regularly run mother's day op-ed articles about how X was like a mother to me, or that mother's day was depressing to me because I didn't have a mother, or how just because I'm not a mother people should still honor my professional accomplishments and not reduce women to wombs, and really we should include aunts and mentors and whatever else. There's a definite effort to downgrade motherhood afoot, even if not every individual in every case agrees with every aspect of it.

This strikes me as kinda sanewashing or bad-faith

I don't claim or believe that what I'm describing is any more or less sane than what the OP is describing. It's just different, and I believe a more accurate characterization.

Trump and the Republicans have played things like "post-birth abortions" very well so far. If they're smart, they'll apply the same mix of hyperbole and accuracy for the "abolition of motherhood". The Republicans may struggle with young women, but married women with children have been fertile ground (excuse the metaphor) for them and other conservative parties in the past.

Speaking of post-birth abortions, is this a real thing? My uneducated assumption : it's not, but also there is some kernel of truth there. Any abortion past fetal viability might look a lot like baby killing to someone who is watching it. How many of these happen every year? I will confess near complete ignorance.

While abortion is generally a winning issue for Democrats, they don't do themselves any favors when they hem-and-haw about late term abortions. It makes me think that the modal Democratic politician would support something that looks a lot like a baby being ripped from the womb. Biden, to his credit, did flatly say during the debate that he does not support late term abortions. Republicans in general should make this is an issue and force Democrats to take a stand against the more insane members of their coalition.

Trump was referring to comments made by the then-Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam in which he said:

“[Third trimester abortions are] done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Source here.

The specific problem that conservatives are deriding is when a woman has a late-term abortion but the child is still alive after the procedure. Is this a common occurrence? I don't think anyone argues for that. (Though "Most clinicians (69%) who report performing D&Es at 18 weeks last menstrual period or greater do not routinely induce fetal demise preoperatively." apparently, which changes my mind a little towards "this could be happening more often than I would guess.")

The important things to note are that:

  1. It does happen occasionally. Dr. Willard Cates, then-director of abortion surveillance at the CDC, estimated “that 400 to 500 abortion live births” occurred every year in the United States.

    Melissa Ohden is famously a survivor of a Saline Abortion at 31 weeks. She was saved by a nurse who heard her crying as she lay among medical waste at a US hospital. Not only does it happen, it happens to neonates who might be able to survive, if provided the same level of care that a wanted child of X gestational weeks would receive as a matter of course.

  2. It seems like an obvious area where Liberals and Conservatives could come together and agree on what is right and wrong. "My body, my choice," OK, maybe Liberals really believe that. But once the child's out of the body, then it's not the mother's choice, is it? Why wouldn't such children be provided the same level of care that neonates receive in every NICU across the country?

    But yet there is no agreement from the left of the aisle on this. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act has faced fierce partisan opposition. Why is this?

Much the same reason that there is resistance to efforts to require anesthetic for aborted babies when the abortion is done at a late enough stage for the baby to feel pain, or resistance to efforts to make the killing of an unborn baby by e.g. a drunk driver a criminal offence. That is, defenders of abortion recognise the political danger of giving an inch.

Once you concede the baby has any rights, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify why this but not that. Once you start saying that it's right to save the life of a born child who is dying from an incomplete abortion, well, people might question whether it was right to try to kill it in the first place.

The left engages in MMA, the right engages in WWE.

For those of us who aren't into televised fighting, what does this mean?

I think WWE is scripted/fake, and MMA is an actual sport, correct? How does that apply here?

My best guess: the left's decisions seem directed towards the goal of winning: do not give an inch. The right's decisions seem directed towards pleasing an audience: the base?

It seems to me that "winning" in the case of the left is really just pleasing the base's preferences: wanting to get abortions. Are you saying the right's base has silly preferences or something?

The funny thing is, as one of the resident left-leaning people, both sides think the other side are genius political actors, racking up win after win, while their side is useless, weak, and being rolled over.

I think part of it is that in a 50/50 political world, and with enough states under strong Dem and GOP control, there are overreaches on both sides to make it seem like either side is running over things, based on your own views, while thinking your side is unable to fight.

What are the main losses that you'd point to? The Supreme court, sure. Elon buying twitter. What else?

The funny thing is, as one of the resident left-leaning people, both sides think the other side are genius political actors, racking up win after win, while their side is useless, weak, and being rolled over.

There's nothing funny about it, they're both pointing at something real. I don't know how you can look at the sudden repudiation of colorblindness in favor of esoteric racialism, or redefining basic terms as "woman" and "mother" as per the OP, the turning of neutral institutions into enforcers of the new dogma, and tools for censorship etc., etc., etc., and not come to the conclusion that whoever is responsible for that are genius political actor scoring win after win.

Sure, an earnest left winger might point out that their ideals about helping the common man, not draping Goldman Sachs offices trans flags. They might also point out that it's also a mark of political genius to use left wing social causes as a front for redirecting more and more power to the rich.

They're both right. My issue with the earnest left winger is that he doesn't actually want to get rid of the political geniuses that are reshaping the world to their liking, he just wants them to also implement his economic agenda.

Despite the well-known Roman disregard for fetal and infant life, they established that a "nasciturus" posseses certain legal rights, particularly concerning inheritance, as if it was already born.

A post-birth abortion is an oxymoron, like a post-birth miscarriage.

I think critics would be quite happy to go back to calling it "infanticide", but there's resistance to that too. Just like "woke", "SJW", and "PC".

About a year or two ago there was a article published in a medical journal by two notable medical ethicists evaluating the possibility of infanticide, calling it “post-birth abortion” and coming down in favor of it.

It takes lots of study, and a couple of advanced degrees, before you become morally advanced enough to advocate killing babies.

Got a link? I need to keep that one handy. Not that linking it will ever do anything but trigger the "it's not happening" -> "and they deserve it" shift

Link (from 2013, not "about a year or two ago")

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus's health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant, and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Editor's justification for publishing the article

This extension of the existing debate around infanticide from medical indications to social indications is relatively novel. I don't personally agree with it. But their arguments—based on the similar moral status of the fetus and neonate—call for rebuttal.

This paper was scrutinised by three peer reviewers and revised in light of their comments. The Journal publishes or refrains from publishing articles, not because of the controversial nature of their conclusion, but rather on the quality of the argument. If an argument were based on clearly and obviously mistaken premises, then we would reject it. But in this case there has been a long and ongoing debate on the moral status of early human life—embryos, fetuses, and neonates, as the above literature attests.

The Journal is publishing opposing views to accompany this controversial article.

I do approve of the editor's justification for publishing the article. Free speech above all.

Infanticide is currently legal in the Netherlands. The “Groningen Protocol” allows doctors to kill neonates at the request of their parents if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.

Huh. It's... true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol

The Groningen Protocol is a medical protocol created in September 2004 by Eduard Verhagen, the medical director of the department of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in Groningen, the Netherlands. It contains directives with criteria under which physicians can perform "active ending of life on infants" (child euthanasia) without fear of legal prosecution

Who defines "unbearable suffering"?

The final decision about "active ending of life on infants" is not in the hands of the physicians but with the parents

Well then.

At least 20 years ago all cases seem heavy disabilities:

In 2005 a review study was undertaken of all 22 reported cases between 1997 and 2004.[7] All cases concerned newborns with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. In all cases, at least 2 doctors were consulted outside the medical team. In 17 of 22 cases, a multidisciplinary spina bifida team was consulted. All parents consented to the termination of life; in 4 cases they explicitly requested it. The mean time between reporting of the case and the decision concerning prosecution was 5.3 months.

There's a thing called neglect deaths that float around the conservative circles I interact with. There's also some rhetoric around the six states that do not have any term limits on abortion, mostly from some conservatives twisting "all stages of pregnancy" (the usual language used in the laws) into "up to and including birth."

Having trouble finding it now, but I recall an account from a former abortion provider that they'd induce labor after doing something that was supposed to kill the baby, I forget if this was pharmaceutical or surgical. In some instances the baby would come out not dead.

There was a rule that mandated that the hospital provide life-saving care only if the parents wanted it or if the baby was above a certain weight. Part of this doctor's realization that they needed to get out of this line of work involved them fudging the numbers so that the writhing premie would be saved instead of left to die.

I tried getting ChatGPT to assist me and while it couldn't dig this story up, it did find this: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/35725/what-happens-when-babies-survive-abortion-a-doctors-alarming-response

Dr. DeShawn Taylor, who runs an abortion and Ob/Gyn clinic in Phoenix, Ariz. and who was formerly the medical director at Planned Parenthood Arizona, was filmed undercover saying that according to Arizona law "if the fetus comes out with any signs of life" at an abortion clinic, "we're supposed to transport it … to the hospital."

However, when asked on camera, if at her clinic "is there any standard procedure for verifying signs of life?", she didn't answer with a specific procedure, but rather said: "I mean, the key is you need to pay attention to who's in the room, right? Because the thing is the law states that you're not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise so it's really tricky."

These folks are aware of popular opinion, and they're competent enough to get through med school. They're not going to advertise that they're trying to work around the laws, you're only going to find evidence through undercover operations and whisteblowers.

On "post-birth abortion" (more accurately, non-resucitation of neonatal infants) the Republicans are right that this occurs, though it is a matter of physician's judgement rather than something the mother can just demand:

In these cases, where there is little or no prospect of an infant surviving after birth, families might opt for perinatal palliative care, or comfort care — prioritizing comfort while allowing an infant to die naturally without exercising full resuscitation efforts.

https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/02/27/fact-check-do-democrats-support-abortion-up-until-and-after-birth/984338007/

They conclude that, fortunately, there is no actual post-birth abortion... because they DEFINE abortion to exclude such cases. That's like saying there are no gun owners who commit school shootings, because you DEFINE "gun owner" to exclude those who use guns for illegal purposes that would lead to their gun licence being revoked.

For moderates on abortion who don't even like the existence of a slippery slope towards infanticide (e.g. as "little prospect" becomes extended, then a judgement for the mother etc.) this sort of thing is cold comfort and an easy point of attack for Republicans against Democrats.

More generally, to see how this is a needlessly difficult issue for Democrats, see how the (generally sympathetic to them) FactCheck puts it:

Claim: Democrats “introduced legislation that allowed abortion on demand ... up to the moment of birth."

Claimed by: Lindsey Graham

Fact check by FactCheck.org: Spins the Facts

Same with AP news:

Claim: Forty-nine Democratic senators voted that it should be lawful to kill a full-term baby the moment before birth while it is still inside its mother.

Claimed by: social media users

Fact check by AP News: Misleading.

These editorial spins are fact-checker answers for when they can't say that something is false, but they would love to do so.

These editorial spins are fact-checker answers for when they can't say that something is false, but they would love to do so.

What you're doing here seems to be the exact process Scott argued for in "Bounded Distrust". You're looking at a system that lies a lot, and you're extracting usable signal from it by comparing the output of that system to the rules that supposedly constrain its falsehoods. As I understand his arguments, this should be a straightforward process to obtain truth-value, which is then generally persuasive. I think this is an interesting example of the "Bounded Distrust" thesis actually being tested.

I think you are entirely correct. I don't expect your argument to be very persuasive to anyone you're responding to, though, because the additional indirection provides too many degrees of epistemic freedom. "The Rules" leave you in a position of inferring the truth, and inference is much easier to dismiss. The Rules were created, it seems to me, with this goal in mind: to provide cover to rationalization. As I've mentioned elsewhere in the context of masked rioters, plausible deniability adds value at every step of the process of rationalization. "Bounded Distrust" is just a formalized defense of rationalization.

I think it's simple, really. The latest abortion must take place before the earliest premature baby is born, otherwise it's very clearly baby killing.

That's about 21 weeks, last I checked.

If baby-killing is based on whether it can be kept alive outside the mother using current technology, does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing? For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing, since theoretically each sperm can survive if you can stick it into an artificial womb with an egg and have it become a child? Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?

does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing

Yes, it does.

For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing

I don't see why. Neither sperm nor eggs are people, nor are they distinct or unique from their source. It is only at conception, the combining of genetics, that new people are created. Many die early. Some die later. All die eventually.

Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?

No, not until you actually turn skin cells into a human. Then, it would be.

If we can deliver a baby at 21 weeks, then an abortion at 21 weeks is infanticide. Before conception there is no baby, no person. In your skin example it is the same. If you could breathe the spark of life into a dead skin cell, such that it was the equivalent of a fertilized egg, and then raised it to maturity, then destroyed it, that would be murder.

I'd be happy to address the specifics of such technology when it comes closer to reality.

does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing?

It's already baby-killing, in my view.

If baby-killing is based on whether it can be kept alive outside the mother using current technology, does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing?

Yes

For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing, since theoretically each sperm can survive if you can stick it into an artificial womb with an egg and have it become a child?

No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed

Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?

No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed

You are conflating ignoring the potential to create a new organism with the harming of existing organisms.

Yes

Why would morality track technological development in this way? You could already make an embryo survive by sticking it in a woman, that might even be cheaper than the hypothetical artificial womb even in the future where such technology exists, but for some reason its existence the moral relevancy of embryos?

No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed

This is based entirely on the definition of "organism", why would such a distinction have any moral relevance? Both are equally unthinking/unfeeling and both are similarly capable of developing into a human if given extensive support. (And braindead humans are organisms too, are they included?)

species homo sapiens

Why is species what matters? An embryo with a dozen cells has moral relevance in a post-artificial-womb world but a sapient alien or a member of Homo Erectus pleading for his life wouldn't?

I don't mind biting the "sapient aliens don't matter but human embryos do" bullet. I value humanity, not intelligence. But if you care about sapience rather than humanity per se, how about the baby counts as a baby once it has a brain?

I'm not a human so... fuck you too buddy? Actually- I'm a bit of a bleeding heart so I'm willing to play tit for tat with forgiveness and hope you eventually change your mind. But seriously, one sapient manifestation of the divine to another- I recommend you get out of the defecting against aliens business before the aliens become common.

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Why would morality track technological development in this way

I'm 100% pro life, so I don't think morality tracks development this way. But someone on the fence might say something like, "A fetus has significant moral worth, though not enough to balance out the singular imposition on the mother. Once that imposition is removed, there is no justification to not provide all available medical technologies to caring for the well being of the child."

both are similarly capable of developing into a human if given extensive support.

This is completely false. One already is a human organism, one is not human any more than a pile of water (35 L), carbon (20 kg), ammonia (4 L), lime (1.5 kg), phosphorus (800 g), salt (250 g), saltpeter (100 g), sulfur (80 g), fluorine (7.5 g), iron (5 g), silicon (3 g) and trace amounts of fifteen other elements.

(And braindead humans are organisms too, are they included?)

Of course. I get the feeling we're on different moral planets. I'm a human-protectionist.

sapient alien or a member of Homo Erectus pleading for his life wouldn't?

Where do you get that idea? I would extend the protection and provision of resources to not only these sapient aliens, but also their entire lifecycle from moment of whatever the equivalent of conception is for them.

This is completely false.

agreed... if we presuppose the scientific definition of genetic organism. But wasn't that the contention? And more importantly, is that really the precise line your ethics draws?

Eggs are part of the human reproductive cycle. So why does a zygote get a 'still an organism' pass when it relies on nutrients it doesn't produce itself? Why do humans get a 'still an organism' pass when they rely on amino acids and oxygen that we don't produce ourselves? And why doesn't the egg get a similar 'still an organism' pass when it relies on sperm that it doesn't produce itself?

Again- I know the scientific definition of organism. But- It sounds like you might already agree that sapient computer viruses could have ethical weight even if not scientifically categorized as organisms. Genetic independence from other genetic systems isn't the only or even the most principled way to cleave reality at the edges. So why do you personally choose to cleave it there? If you came across an alien species with sentient sperm, can you see your position evolving?

I don't mean to say your position is invalid... But perhaps the value of sperm, eggs, and zygotes can be more favorably framed with respect to how much effort they concentrate within the 'purpose' of the human reproductive cycle. Sperm evolved to be shotgunned, most of them expecting to die. Eggs get spent monthly, regardless of use. Zygotes represent a sudden spike in progress. Perhaps that provides a less deniable reason to draw the line there.

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https://odh.ohio.gov/know-our-programs/breastfeeding

We still have "mothers" in Ohio, for now. Almost reminds me of a warrant canary: when the state websites no longer use the word "mother," you know they've been got to.

Looks like the NJ bureaucrats got the memo, but not the officials.

https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2022/approved/20220922a.shtml

Everyone quoted (the First Lady of NJ, the Health Commissioner, and the Department of Children and Families Commissioner) uses "mothers", but the website uses "birthing parent" once, unquoted. The Labor Department Commissioner manages to avoid both.

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