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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30071 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Huge news from South America today.

A single judge in Brazil has not only blocked X in the country, but is requiring Apple and Google to remove VPNs from their phones, and is imposing a $9,000 daily fine (basically a year's salary) for anyone in the country caught using a VPN.

Elon Musk attracted the ire of this particular judge, Alexandre de Moraes, when he posted about the judge's previous autocratic attempts to silence free speech and to jail opponents of the current regime led by Lula da Silva. The legal system is very strange in Brazil, and apparently Supreme Court judges have huge unilateral powers to try cases and enforce laws as they see fit. This particular judge has done so thousands of times.

Now X is banned.

With dissent being silenced, and a corrupt socialist in charge, it seems that yet another Latin American country is set on the path to tyranny.

I'm a brazilian in his 20's. Here's my long-winded commentary on this:

If studying Latin America can help on anything, it's to highlight the pitfalls of "democracy" and everything that was assumed to be universally true by The Enlightenment and still taken as self-evident by some of us today.

Brazil is a straight-up failed state. Despite being blessed with good weather, natural resources, lack of natural disasters due to its position among the tectonic plates, lots of land, large population and since 1985 a "democracy" (that is now dying), it consistently manages to fail in becoming relevant. This deeply troubles many brazilians, including me as a young kid, because as reflected in the joke "Brazil is the country of the future and it'll always be", we look at ourselves and forever wonder "Why aren't we a first-world country?"

There's many crappy usual explanations for why we failed: Colonialization Past, American Imperialism, "Corrupt culture" inherited from the portuguese, Systemic Racism, etc. However the more you look into it, the more you realize that none of those are the real reason. If there was a point where you can point to in Brazil's history and say "only downhill from here", it's the "Proclamation of The Brazilian Republic".

I'm not a monarchist, I believe that in the right conditions democracy (ideally a more decentralized system of government) wins over more centralized systems like monarchies or dictatorships by avoiding the issue that "Philosopher Kings" are impractical, rare and mortal. However it probably really starts there, with the army, the oligarchic farmers and the intelligentsia all supporting getting rid of the Emperor (which had some moderating power although in a constitutional monarchy), the Emperor in turn does something rather uncommon in history (due to many reasons but mostly being tired of "The Paraguayan War" and lacking greed for power) and instantly surrenders the throne even though he had not only the popular support but also the support of the navy.

It's extra funny to me that this moment is still praised today given not only the current state of the country, but also the countless coups that occurred after that, the fact that this was just after and in OPPOSITION to Princess Isabel signing a law abolishing slavery, and better of all that Deodoro da Fonseca (the man who declared The Republic), which by his letters just before the "revolution" normally supported the monarchy, acted in such a way out of jealousy due to rumors that the Emperor had promoted his romantic rival instead of him. That absolute clown-show is taught to us as something we should praise, because it's "democracy" and democracy is inherently good regardless of any result that it brings, including the country becoming significantly worse.

Fast-forward to today and we can see a continuation of the shitshow that this country has been since it stopped being a monarchy, casually switching through history between failed republic and tyranny, with the help of science and history we also have a much better answer for why we fail to become a better country.

"Free Speech" is used by socialists and all kinds of demagogues to fool a 83 IQ poor population that they'll "solve all issues" as long as you give them power, elections select for the opposite it's supposed to select for and the consistent winners are often the most psychopathic greedy liars you can imagine (which eventually result in Venezuela, at least kings were a glorious coinflip), and due to the gap in IQ between people of different ancestries, inequality raises and creates extra social tension/division which fuels political polarization and justification of authoritarian behavior like what Alexandre de Moraes does. It also doesn't help that women as a group consistently vote for whoever tell them nice things (even if by lying) and are the biggest supporters of censoring what they consider "mean people". Brazil is ethnically, politically and economically divided through a spectrum of "North to South", which "coincides" with places where there was recent euro mass immigration and places where there wasn't as many. The Northern regions of course massively supports the people behind all the censorship and it was a key source of votes to them winning the elections through the years (and packing the Supreme Court in the same strategy that Venezuela used and the Democrats want to use in USA too). Countless brazilians right now, in the X platform itself, are celebrating this "Great Nationalistic and Socialist Act" by Alexandre de Moraes striking down an "Evil Right-wing White Billionaire". I don't like Bolsonaro but the whole "he's about to start a coup" was of course, as almost anything in mainstream media, a strawman. I think Bolsonaro actually sort of did want to start a military coup but he and most behind the scenes knew it was impossible because he had little institutional power, the unique side that could realistically start a coup (and ARE STARTING IT) were the socialists that have almost every institution packed with their own tribe by this point.

Therefore, as Padme from Star Wars once correctly said: "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause."

Tyranny is eventually welcome with open arms by democracy, or at least the current way we "practice" democracy. Do not assume the people aren't complicit with this until it starts to REALLY hurt them, many Venezuelans that came as refuges to Brazil still believe Hugo Chavez was "good for the country", they're often just "confused and indignant" of how things eventually went wrong with Maduro and so on.

I used to despair that not only we're losing democracy, but The West in general is also trending in a similar way although slower. The entire western hemisphere seems to be becoming like Brazil, bit by bit, all sort of places that I used to admire in North America and Europe gradually resembles me of my own country. There's soon gonna be no champion of Free Speech, Small Government and so on in the global stage.

Totalitarianism, A.I Automation, Populational Collapse and Genetic Engineering. What a great combination of incoming catastrophes, I truly think we're entering a new global "dark age". Some still try to clumsily "go back", "restore tradition" and so on, but I ask of you, can we stop this foolish nonsense?

Voting for those that "want to go back" may be a good stopgap, the practical way of delaying the incoming stuff, but those "traditions", "ideals" and so on, they've ultimately got us here. I believe it's a natural progression. The slave morality of Christianity (which modern christians need to creatively reinterpret as to not fall in contradiction given Jesus didn't seem to like rich/successful people just like their average political enemy doesn't), the "Free Speech" that was used by all kinds of destructive people to subvert an entire hemisphere by this point and prepare it for complete Tyranny (because we found out that the average population has little resistance to mass propaganda and aren't as much agents of reason as they're agents of faith), the focus on "empathy"/"morality" as opposed in raw intelligence/IQ (which seems to be the most consistent metric by which societies seem to become "better"/"civilized" from economy, politics to general social cohesion and game theory cooperation).

I believe we're invited to what I consider the "True End of Enlightenment" and the epitome of the consequences of the French Revolution. I believe we're invited to accept the tragic incoming consequences of the nice-sounding beliefs that began to be preached by then, and tear it all down as we contemplate what went wrong.

I believe we need a new system of values, a new political ideology, and a new set of mythos (historical or fictional) to base ourselves in.

It's the Death of God AND Enlightenment. We've killed both, or perhaps we just found out both of their tombs empty when we inched closer to see their full glory. Perhaps we were just delusional to believe in them in the first place.

False promises of "the way" to paradise.

In general, the problem in Latin America is that high inequality means the rich are typically comfortable enough not to mount decisive action against the left (which comes with nasty stuff like risking their wealth, their lives, their retirement in Miami etc), so there’s no real opposition other than some atrophied principled conservatives and some crazy weirdos, especially once the left cements its power structure in the military.

Rich American rightists fight more and harder (even if not enough) because there’s nowhere more suited to their politics on earth, certainly in the rich world.

My wife is from Latin America but also has a Spanish passport, and we’ve debated on and off again about moving to Spain with our family if things truly got out of hand in the USA.

I take her point into consideration but my response always boils down to “If the USA turns to shit, there’s nowhere really to retreat to.”

My children are American. Hopefully my children’s children will be American, and their children, and so on and so forth.

Although battles may be fought elsewhere, the war for the future is here, and nowhere else.

What would even be the point of running?

Have you considered that the problem is simply low human capital and an elite culture that developed around exploiting the low human capital through low margin extraction?

"Free Speech" is used by socialists and all kinds of demagogues to fool a 83 IQ poor population that they'll "solve all issues" as long as you give them power

Yeah, I'd say he's considered that.

Brazil’s average IQ isn’t that low.

I used to despair that not only we're losing democracy, but The West in general is also trending in a similar way although slower. The entire western hemisphere seems to be becoming like Brazil, bit by bit, all sort of places that I used to admire in North America and Europe gradually resembles me of my own country. There's soon gonna be no champion of Free Speech, Small Government and so on in the global stage.

This reminded me an old article from Foreign Affairs called The Brazilianization of the World. It is a little bit more lefty critique for my taste, but some passages are eerie:

In political terms, Brazilianization means patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption. Rather than see these as aberrations, we should understand them as the normal state of politics when widely shared economic progress is not available, and the socialist Left can­not act as a countervailing force. It was the industrial proletariat and socialist politics that kept liberalism honest, and prevented elites from instrumentalizing the state for their own interests.

The “revolt of the elites”—their escape from society, physically into heavily guarded private spaces, economically into the realm of global finance, politically into anti-democratic arrangements that out­source responsibility and inhibit accountability—has created hol­lowed-out neoliberal states. These are polities closed to popular pres­sures but open to those with the resources and networks to directly influence politics. The practical consequence is not just corruption, but also states lacking the capacity to undertake any long-range developmental policies—even basic ones that might advance economic growth, such as the easing of regional inequalities. State failure in the pandemic is only the most flagrant recent example.

Brazil’s ignoble history of irresolution and indeterminacy, cou­pled with a dualized society in which hustling is essential to survival, gave birth to Brazilian cynicism. Increasingly, the West is coming to ape this same pattern. Not only does there seem to be no way past capitalist stagnation, but politics is characterized by a void between people and politics, citizens and the state. The ruling class’s relation to the masses is one of condescension. Elites call anyone who revolts against the contemporary order racist, sexist, or some other delegitimizing term. They also advance outlandish conspiracy theories for why electorates have failed to vote for their favored candidate—most visibly with “Russiagate” in the United States and beyond. This phenomenon, dubbed Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome, only breeds further cynicism in Western publics, who are increasingly taken with conspiracy theories of their own. This is another Brazilian speciality: in a country with very low levels of institutional trust and plentiful examples of actual conspiracies, conspiracy theories flourish.

Revolts against the establishment, when they aren’t driven by QAnon-style derangement, wield the weapon of anti-politics, where­by not only formal politics, but representation and political authority itself are rejected. Anti-politics tends to result in either a delegitimation of democracy itself, leading to authoritarian rule, or it prompts technocrats to learn from populists, returning to the scene promising an end to corruption and real change. The result is the same sort of distant, out-of-touch politics that prompted anti-political revolts in the first place. Brazil’s history from 2013 to 2019 is this dynamic presented in pure, crystallized form. But the same pattern is visible in Italy’s Five-Star Movement, the anti-corruption protests that led to Viktor Orbán’s ascent in Hungary, Trump, and Boris Johnson’s technopopulist attempt to defuse Brexit.

I am from Eastern Europe and I was born into socialist country and lived my childhood through the tail end of communist regime and then the newborn democracy. I disagree with the author that this is the result of some neoliberal capitalist plot, this pervasive feeling of frustration, political apathy and resulting cynicism was defining feature of late-stage communist regimes as well. I'd say it is the feature of out-of-touch bureaucratic regimes, all too quick to use force to save their pretend legitimacy. Everybody shouts the slogans and lies and everybody knows that everybody knows it's all a farce. Actually it is even worse than that, if somebody has some ideals or expects some decent behavior, he is laughed at - especially if something wrong happens to him. It is certain level of schadenfreude - you stupid naive moron, you thought you could have some hope? You got what you deserve for not being as cynical as me.

Corruption is no longer viewed as something wrong, it is basically the normal way to live. Everybody knows that some professions are underpaid, that some palms have to be greased so it is absolutely normal that your doctor asks for a bribe, if only because he also has to bribe somebody else in order to keep his license. "Patrimonialism, clientelism, and corruption" is the oil that lubricates the whole machine, everybody understands and accepts it. Everything is so bleak, people find solace in their private spaces - their huts where they can escape for a brief time and forget the drudgery and hopelessness of their situation with elephant doses of alcohol. Yeah, it is quite depressing and I always get this feeling if I watch some local movies from 70ies and 80ies. You can almost feel it through the screen.

blessed with good weather, natural resources

That's a bit of a stretch.

Isn't a significant part of the country a) practically impassable rainforest unfit for agricultural use b) similarly impassable arid grassland and scrub, which is also of little use?

Brazil's the size of the continental US and Mexico combined. Consider the "impassable" areas like uninhabited Alaska.

Except our version of the Amazon - the Mississippi basin - has incredible natural soil quality while as I understand it the actual Amazon does not.

How so? Most of Brazil has magnificent weather.

But is is the sort of weather that is conducive to being a developed country? Meaning a weather not characterized by extremes?

Brazil was the 4th largest agricultural producer (in dollar terms) in 2020, so the weather is good enough for that at least.

Alexandre de Moraes

This guy's Wiki is just too perfect:

De Moraes's presidency of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court and certain actions he took during the 2022 Brazilian general election has made him the target of several false conspiracy theories by former President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters.[4] After the 2023 Brazilian Congress attack, de Moraes ordered several judicial actions to maintain Brazil's democratic rule.[5]

He's doing it for democracy.

He's going after starlink now too. A trial run of what the Dems would do here I suspect: full court lawfare against one target at a time and any business that associates with them.

Well Silicon Valley wants to run the US, let's see if they can run around corrupt South American judges first.

Balaji's "network" is finally getting into a hot confrontation with nation states. There's going to be a lot to learn from this one.

I'm really interested in how they'll try to shut down VPNs and Starlink practically. It's pretty much impossible to jam so they're going to have to try to prevent smuggling of the terminals or successfully pressure the US to get to Musk and his infrastructure, which I find unlikely.

If they just randomly search people's phones, the fine is so devastating that people might be very afraid of getting caught even if there is a low probability.

Musk seems determined to go full John Galt here so there's a double-digit chance he'll end up in jail, X will be banned in the U.S., and Starlink will be given to "reliable people" to run.

Musk seems determined to go full John Galt

I'd say it's less that Musk is going full John Galt, and more that the western world is devolving into every bit the dystopia Atlas Shrugged depicts, ham fisted and almost comically stupid as it may be.

There is also a small but non zero chance he pulls a Uno reverse card and does just that to the US government. Which in itself is kinda amazing.

I'm sure top men are scouring through out treaty obligations with Brazil as we speak to see if there's something to pin him on.

Oh, sorry if my comment was meant to imply that this incident will land him in jail. Of course it won't.

The way he could end up in jail is lawfare in the U.S.. If they can do it to Trump, they can do it to him. He seems to be pissing off a lot of powerful people.

I see no chance Musk will end up in jail. At the point they would be jailing Musk it would be easier and neater just to liquidate him for a lot of reasons.

I think prison is more likely than murder because of the psychology of the perps. These were the kids who told teacher, not kids that started fights. They enjoy watching Authority punish their victims while taking a victory lap about how they made it happen. You can see this from all their published fantasies about Trump and Musk getting raped in prison.

Just having victims quietly murdered doesn't satisfy that sort of sadism. It needs to be public and identifiable as their handywork for them to enjoy it.

The "quietly disappear an inconvenience" crowd are much more professional and not driven by the same kind of narcissistic pathologies. And I suspect musk and thiel have taken steps to be indispensable assets to them: launching spy satellites and whatever spook-contracting Thiel is up to tends to help there.

Just having victims quietly murdered doesn't satisfy that sort of sadism. It needs to be public and identifiable as their handywork for them to enjoy it.

Quietly murdered, sure, but terrorists who'll shoot somebody while posting a 10,000-word manifesto are also a thing and that side of the aisle isn't devoid of them.

For Musk to end up in jail, powerful people need merely to stand back and let overzealous prosecutors do their work. Trump's legal farce in New York proved that.

I mean yeah but all those same powerful people would need to do to kill him is shoot him with a gun.(Not them personally obviously but you get the point) That's 10x easier than the trail playing out and can't be undone or reversed by anyone.

More comments

He's not Galt. He's Rearden.

Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the Brazilian military has some amount of reliance on Starlink. What are the chances that this is actually stemming from weird, completely internal politics about military interdependence with anything US, with one faction wanting to increase ties and the other faction wanting to decrease them... and this being a simple power play by the latter faction? X itself may not be an actual target, but a means to this end.

That is, one completely plausible scenario is that it's just a crazy authoritarian turn. Another plausible scenario is that factions in the gov't/military are fighting over things like Starlink, and the anti-Starlink faction is losing on that direct, internal fight (e.g., can't get the military to give it up, no matter how much they try to throw around political weight internally). So, the anti-Starlink faction finds an alternate means. The value they get from increasing authoritarianism WRT X, proper, may be a lot, a little, or even slightly negative, so long as they think the value they get from winning the Starlink fight is higher.

That's worse than China's VPN policy. There's no carrier requirement to block VPN apps, and the fine is far lower, apparently starting at 100 yuan, roughly $15. Also I've never heard of anyone actually getting penalized, all the enforcement appears to be focused on mucking about with the packets.

Banning Twitter and then banning VPNs to keep people from getting to Twitter anyway seems to me almost like banning a publication and then, to impede people from still reading it, banning eyeglasses.

Not particularly surprising, coming in both the context of the recent French move against Telegram and Musk's ongoing spats with the Biden administration, both of which provide diplomatic cover for Brazil to do something similar.

It's not exactly unique to this either. Brazil has a bit of a... I don't want to say habit, but leverages a trope of using western political rheotorical tropes in the course of its own actions, and/or encouraging others to do the same. The promoted coverage of the post-Bolsonaro crackdown on Bolsonaro has heavy thematic overlap with the European far-right and American Jan 6 partisan rhetoric favorable to the current administrations on either side of the Atlantic.

A fine of 9000$ is quite something. A sufficiently determined tyrant will force ISPs to report connections to known VPN services. Can an ISP identify VPN endpoints by the nature of the traffic (not easily, I think)? What safer alternatives are there to the simple 'select VPN service, pay, connect'?

There's always Tor, or the dVPNs. But a sufficiently aggressive State can slowly figure out a list of badwrong IPs. To say nothing of more sophisticated techniques.

Ironically the one thing that defeats this is Starlink, since it's essentially impossible to jam and never interacts with local infrastructure. They can't take the sky from you.

The drawback is that the physical terminals are large and can be made illegal.

This is really no different from the numerous bans on satellite television by all sorts of tinpot dictators in the past. And even under such bans, dishes were super common because football.

The one practical way you can attack this is not technical but political, with states colluding to shut down Musk for undermining them. But this is a hard sell to the US because Starlink is critical military infrastructure.

Every time I've tried Tor, it was extremely slow to the point of being unusable.

Same. I would only ever use Tor to e.g. read The Great Replacement while I was in New Zealand, where I could leave it loading while I grabbed a sandwich. It's completely non-viable for something like Twitter or 4chan.

That all your traffic is to a single endpoint is a pretty big clue that you’re routing it through a VPN. For popular services the IPs are also necessarily public since the clients need that information in order to establish the connection. So, identify all the single endpoint clients, then compare against a list of known VPN IPs, and you’ve caught a lot of violaters.

Though if you’re using something like AWS to provide your VPN service I suppose it would be trivial to add a feature that allocates a new IP just for you, just for the length of your session. Heck, you could have it switched it out every few minutes to confuse the government’s tracking effort. Or establish a dozen VPN tunnels and round robin packets through them.

Plenty of companies use VPN logins as security for remote connections though -- I don't think you can just ban this kind of traffic without a lot of collateral damage.

Back in the long-ago of the 2007-2009 era, various electronic freedom groups established and encouraged a wide variety of individual users to establish limited VPNs and forwarding services, as a parallel-but-less-fraught alternative to the then-new Tor network. I'm... not so optimistic we'll see a recurrence of that.

You could enforce a VPN licensing regime where only licensed companies are approved to run/access VPNs.

As far as I understand he didn’t ban VPNs, only VPNs used to access Twitter. That makes enforcement much harder.

Couldn't Apple and Google easily refuse? It would be hard for him to ban Google and Apple from the country and the people wouldn't stand for it. There would basically be no smart phones for people to buy.

They could. But the people who run those companies are cowards and non-factors so they won't.

They already remove apps from their stores in certain countries, why would they not in this case?

If one does it and the other doesn't, then the one who doesn't will lose an enormous amount of market share. But if the demand is sufficiently unreasonable, it's easier to count on the other party not doing it. It's a coordination problem solved by the ridiculousness of the demand.

I’m very interested in seeing what this does to Brazil’s freedom house rankings.

Also very interested to hear commentary from Brazilians, both IrL and on the motte.

I think we both know that Freedom House is a leftist political advocacy group that couldn't care less about freedom of speech. They'll probably boost Brazil's ranking since they have a left-wing president now.

How much of a joke is their list? The U.S. is ranked 58th on their list despite arguably being the freest country in the world. South Africa is just behind at rank 69.

Many people will be opposed to this move on Brazil's part, but for the wrong reasons, chief among which is national pride. As a free speech absolutist, I'm opposed to this move because I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted. This includes not just "wholesome" speech, but:

  • true threats, including to the head of state/government of one's country
  • deliberate defamations
  • shouting fire in a crowed theatre - even if this leads to a stampede, even if the stampede causes a mass casualty event
  • bullying speech, including telling someone to commit suicide — even if this leads to their suicide — even if they are minors
  • advocacy for the violent overthrow of government
  • advocacy for preemptive nuclear strikes against any entity whatsoever
  • and so on, provided it's just a speech, and not an act (speech act counts as speech for my purposes).

The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation. There is no such thing as non-physical pain, the kind people talk about when they talk about e.g. losing someone they love. That talk of 'pain' is merely a figure of speech. ". To which the reply may be: "but phantom limb pain is non-physical". To which the reply is: "no it's physical in my sense. For pain to be physical it's not necessary that it's triggered by a physical stimulus. It suffices that it's experienced as physical, i.e. it has the distinctive qualia associated with pain and is locatable in some specific part of the body or a generic region of the body. And phantom limb pain meets those conditions."

So, suppose you're in the Ukrainian military, and one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians (or you can switch the nationalities if you want, doesn't really matter, whichever side you have more sympathy for). It's clear that what he's engaging in is "mere" speech - he's not causing any physical harm himself, he's merely communicating words and numerical coordinates to others. Should he face any consequences whatsoever for his actions? Would you say "well shucks, it's plain that what he's doing is materially hurting the war effort and is directly causing the deaths of our fellow soldiers, but because it is just speech, we can't legally do anything"?

Are you even permitted to fire him from his post in the military? If you are, that already seems like a step down from "absolutism" to me - it may not be jail time, but it's still a consequence of some sort.

You raise a good point. It's tricky to come up with a foolproof way of drawing the speech versus act ("words speak louder than actions", "practice what you preach") distinction.

Here's another example. Let's say someone is gifted with a thunderous voice and that when he shouts, he shatters the eardrums of people in a 10 feet radius. Should he be free to shoot in public? Presumably not. But that's because clearly this scenario has more in common with typical cases of physical violence. Here the physical quality of sound (rather than the meaning of sound) is what is playing a decisive causal role. So it's no longer pure speech, but something one might call a "sonic act".

Notice that the fact a shout is not per se meaningful speech is not the decisive consideration here. After all, imagine that our protagonist instead of letting out a meaningless shout, choose instead to recite the Constitution in public at the top of his volume. Then the sounds he make are meaningful, but still even a free speech absolutist shouldn't want to allow that. Why? Because by reciting the constitution he's simultaneously doing two things. The first is exercising his free speech. The second is an act of sonic terrorism. If due to the peculiar constitution of his physiology, these two things cannot be cleanly separated unfortunately (at least when he chooses to speak at the top of his volume), then he should not be allowed to perform the one because he can't help but also perform the other as well.

In your scenario ("one of your compatriots is discovered to be relaying detailed plans of troop movements and locations to the Russians") I'm inclined to say even a free speech absolutist shouldn't allow that. But I will need to find a different basis (than "sonic terrorism") on which to exclude that kind of speech from protection. It seems that this is clearly an action and no longer just speech, in the same way that, say, taking money out of someone's pocket is action rather than speech (even though no one is directly hurt in the process intrinsically speaking). But it can be tricky to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions that give the correct verdict in all cases.

From all the possible gotchas, this is probably the weakest. In the military you have duties, and not aiding the enemy is one of them. So you are on the hook. Is it ok to write someone's name in a death note would have been a much more interesting situation.

From all the possible gotchas, this is probably the weakest.

It's not a gotcha. It's an argument.

In the military you have duties, and not aiding the enemy is one of them.

OP said "I believe any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted". If he wants to amend his position to "any speech whatsoever should be legally permitted, except for speech that materially aids the enemy in a time of war", or perhaps "except for any speech that violates your previously agreed upon duties", then he's certainly welcome to do so. But that does, prima facie, appear to be an amendment of the original position.

I don't see contradiction in speech being legal and you being punished for violations of duties contracts etc. Those are orthogonal concepts. You get shot for treason. Since your speech didn't incur other penalties on you on top of the death sentence, you are not being punished for it.

At that point you can limit speech in absolutely any way you see fit. "Well, a citizen of $country is duty bound not to incite hatred. We didn't punish you for your speech on top of your jail sentence for inciting hatred!"

Not quite because the only way to incite hatred it trough speech, but there are many ways to commit treason.. The punishment for robbing a bank silently and robbing a bank shouting give me all your money should be the same

But in this particular example, the treason is entirely through speech. If that counts, so should inciting hatred entirely through speech. I don't really see the relevance that treason can in theory be committed differently.

The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation.

Okay, but do you believe the opposite of this is true as well?

"Bricks and stones may make our homes, but words will never help me."

Usually, people justify free speech not just on the fact that speech doesn't do harm, but because free speech produces some tangible good in the world through the sharing of information.

But if you don't believe words can cause pain, do you also believe that words cannot produce the opposite of pain - pleasure?

Because if words can't affect bodily pain or pleasure for better or worse in your view, wouldn't it be the same whether the government banned speech or allowed it?

But if words can cause pleasure/produce benefits, then how can you maintain that they cannot ever produce harms?

Where do you fall on fraud?

And do you consider copyright violation or trademark infringement to be a form of "mere speech", or does it count as something else?

Interesting. What do you do if a resourseful enemy defames you, suck it up? What do you do if a bunch of people openly conspire to kill you? It appears that you cannot legally defend yourself until they act, which they're free to do at the moment they pick.

If you're physically struck but not hurt, have you been assaulted?

(Not OP, but will try and steelman the position as best I can)

Were such norms in place re: speech, defamation would be "priced in", so to speak, i.e., people would have ingrained defenses against believing defamatory remarks to be true, inculcated over a lifetime of experiencing free speech absolutism first-hand.

So, they'd believe nothing?

What is the mechanism by which you can separate defamatory remarks from genuine ones, which you'd likely want to do in order to retain basic communication ability?

A newspaper (for example) which regularly published untrue defamation would be equally-regularly corrected by competing newspapers, eager to siphon savvy newsreaders away from a competitor. Then the defamatory paper's paying subscribers would vote with their wallets and switch to other papers with better records of truth-telling.

Or so the theory goes.

Presumably conspiracy is a crime because planning crimes is also a crime.

I could see the argument that a threat to commit a crime is not a plan. A threat is usually contingent on some condition.

If the threat is to be believed (presumably threats are punished because we think they are credible) then there's no stated plan as long as the condition isn't fulfilled.

I suppose as soon as the victim ignores the threat, then perhaps the threat can be assumed to be a plan.

Presumably conspiracy is a crime because planning crimes is also a crime.

I'd presume so, yes, but they're claiming they're a free speech absolutist and that any speech act is just speech. Planning to inflict pain doesn't inflict pain itself.

Even if speech is not a crime it can be compelling evidence of another crime. If I confess to the cops that I committed a murder, that can put me away for murder ... unless I was actually on video with a dozen witnesses at the time of the murder, in which case my exact same speech would not get me convicted, because the speech itself isn't the murder.

(Though I'd say it should get me convicted of making a false police report, but I assume this is where @reconnaissent and I differ)

You can oppose this also from pro freedom of speech grounds without being a freedom of speech absolutist.

Personally I find the issue incoherent but I find coherent to have a situation with more vs less freedom of speech but you do need to suppress some organized pollitical comisar factions. For example, eastern european countries post communism that blacklisted communists, are freer countries than western countries today, or their own communist past.

How do you protect freedom of speech absolutism if you allow people whose idea is to suppress all who go against the globohomo "our democracy" faction.

Or take the Jewish supremacist authoritarian faction. These people use their powerful companies and organisations, and donations and plausible epstein type blackmail rings to get their way. Plus, civil rights law and the idea of antisemitism. Should the ADL and Disney have the freedom to coordinate to oppose freedom? What about the influence of people speaking advocating for censoring ideas that offend the "Jews, blacks, women" are wonderful effect? Is AIPAC donation efforts something that should be suppressed? What about journalists citing the ADL to character assassinate people? Now, obviously they utilize censorship constantly, and freedom of speech absolutism is something they oppose. But also they are a faction which there is a legitimate both pro freedom and pro the rights of the groups they have it out against, and pro truth interest in suppressing.

How do you have freedom by not taking away the freedom of political comisars? How do you avoid not losing against more ruthless factions that don't care for a universal freedom of speech and want to censor your group, and allow maximum freedom for theirs?

And is freedom of speech absolutism extending to the kind of people you select to run the pro freedom of speech institutions?

Or is their desire to act otherwise subject to restriction there, and institutions should be run by people willing to abide by certain rules and following a certain perspective? And absolutism would then be for the platforms? That would make more sense. But you do have restrictions based on ideology somewhere, even if not on the platform. Or take judges, to have freedom of speech absolutism you would need judges with your preferences to be selected and judges against freedom of speech (who might express such views) be restricted.

Another issue that ought to be considered is people abandoning their legitimate interests and supporting immoral and unreasonable and even lies, or not making legitimate negative critiques due to fear of coordinated slander and reputation destruction. That is being defamed. People being afraid to speak, that is to say. To be fair, "cancel culture" can include the claim of free de-association in an one sided manner. Although there is also a part of it that is about pressure and fear of losing ones job. I am not sure freedom of speech absolutism works and you have a better system, of people not being afraid if people are restrained from defaming others over nonsense. Although I am a freedom of speech absolutist when it comes to people who are telling a plausibly necessary truth and are whistleblowing.

I am for maximum freedom for people like Gareth Jones and prefer that people like Walter Duranty were fired for spreading lies. And in his time, Gareth Jones was outnumbered because he was attacked by the communists, and friendly travelers in the American establishment while the apologist for the Soviet genocides Walter Duranty won a pulitzer. People at the time lacked the nerve to share Gareth Jones truthtelling in the face of such tactics.

The problem of people who are cowardly in the face of other people using their freedom of speech to label them, as a means of shutting them up, is not something I have seen adequately addressed, by people talking about freedom of speech absolutism. Although, perhaps with less consequences for those whose speech goes against such organized groups, there might be more courage. In general, I think we need a more sophisticated model than freedom of speech absolutism that distinguishes between courageous truth telling and attempts to suppress the truth. While I acknowledge outright censorship is a key part of this, but an important component is drowning good speech, with delegitimizing it on frivolous grounds, lies, fallacies, denials, misdirections and character assassinations. Plus, using their freedom to organize and advocate for cancel culture, and directly threaten people to go along with it, or else.

His management was controversial: he was accused of covering up police violence. One out of every four homicides in the city of São Paulo was committed by the police. In addition, Alexandre de Moraes sent armoured vehicles to suppress left-wing demonstrations.

Alexandre de Moraes assumed office on 22 March 2017. As minister, he claims to defend a policy of "zero tolerance". He denounced the alleged "criminal attitudes" of leftist movements and justified police violence.

Interesting guy, I respect a man who goes full auth just because. In general I’ve always disliked freedom of speech. At best it’s a useful tool for dissidents and political opposition to the current prevailing ideology, given I dislike much of that ideology. But that’s not really a principle, that’s merely strategic. If my ideology was in power, I would have no qualms with suppressing the free speech of my political opponents. If the right finally did score a major victory in a large western country (I count not merely winning an election but deep root-and-branch institutional reform) it would likely be necessary to suppress leftist speech to avoid returning to the same desperate original predicament.

I support free speech not because all speech is good (much of it is bad or even harmful), but because there is no ubermensch that I trust to decide which ideas I'm allowed to hear.

It's worse than oligarchy, isn't it? "You're not smart enough to vote" is both more honest and less insulting than "your vote is super important, let me just make sure you don't do it wrong..."

In general I’ve always disliked freedom of speech. At best it’s a useful tool for dissidents and political opposition to the current prevailing ideology, given I dislike much of that ideology.

At best it's a useful tool for dissidents? Come on, this is an extremely weak take.

The best version of free speech is that the best ideas, and people, can float to the top. Even if you believe in the orthodoxy, if the reigning elite are smart and not tyrants they can use free speech to suss out their own weaknesses, and address them proactively.

Free speech allows for information to flow from the bottom to the top of a hierarchy in a quick and healthy way, letting society pivot and be nimble.

On top of this, it lets people in a society feel they are being heard, and have something to do besides just be ruled over with an iron fist. This means they're more productive, more fulfilled, and can help with social cohesion if people are able to coordinate over the identity of being a citizen.

I'm now curious about what @coffee_enjoyer would say about this as well?

The best case for freedom of speech is that “ideas / types of social organizations float to the top”, but the worst case is that large swathes of the population get manipulated by bad values and lifestyles. We need some way to ensure that only the class of people for whom freedom of speech is genuinely useful are able to practice it. Some ways to do this: (1) restrict freedom of speech to men between the ages of 23-35 who have passed a feasible course on logic, psychology, and sociology either in a written or verbal test; (2) a social practice of electing benevolent censors who filter information for the rest of population, who have passed a more arduous course and are also selected by personality and honesty; (3) require new ideas to be judged in a dispassionate way first, written and read like a PhD thesis; (4) never throw out ideas deemed bad, but sort them and archive them away, so that they can be accessed by reasonable people but not unreasonable people.

If you have a social organization (whether political or communal) which manages to elect “censors” who are genuinely honest, intelligent, and wise, who are humble enough to elect people even greater than themselves, then you have an eternal upwards spiral of prosociality. That can be applied to people, ideas, media, everything. It is the number one most important social technology and is a requirement for human advancement.

So, as examples

(1) astrology would never enter the minds of young people, because they would never read it and be mislead by it — it has literally mislead millions of people who waste time on it, and millions more for centuries in the past.

(2) no song about drugs would ever enter ears of the youth.

(3) loot boxes and gambling would be banned forever.

(4) non-prosocial video games would be relegated to the infirm.

it would likely be necessary to suppress leftist speech to avoid returning to the same desperate original predicament

Why? What threat would they conceivably pose?

It literally worked once, clearly the meme is persuasive, why wouldn’t it work again?

Are you referring to the October Revolution?

I’m talking about the entire history of enlightenment liberal ideas spreading throughout the educated classes.

So you think the reason that happened was due to freedom of speech in itself? I find that a rather simplistic view.

Say rather that free speech is a necessary precondition. The hippies and revolutionaries of the 60s, and before them the socialists and the communists of the 20s, demanded free speech to spread their memes. Then, being less foolish than the conservatives they supplanted, they started shutting it down to prevent right wingers from formenting discontent in the same way.

Necessary but not sufficient. Multiple other social and cultural conditions are necessary as well. Also, my impression is that such leftist attempts at suppression stem from their enemies' observed ability to rally large masses of average people on their side. It's not generally something they're capable of themselves, so attempting to constrain them when the shoe is on the other foot seems unnecessary.

Palin v. The New York Times... still

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals holds:

Palin’s claim was subsequently tried before a jury but, while the jury was deliberating, the district court dismissed the case again—this time under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50. We conclude that the district court’s Rule 50 ruling improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case.

Despite the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal, the jury was allowed to reach a verdict, and it found the Times and Bennet “not liable.” Unfortunately, several major issues at trial—specifically, the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question, and jurors learning during deliberations of the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal ruling—impugn the reliability of that verdict.

For those unfamiliar with the background, in reaction to the 2011 Tucson Shooting of Representative Giffords and several others, the New York Times, among many other media, tried to tie then-relevant once-Vice-Presidential candidate to the shooter. Like all those other media, the proposed connections the Times gave were entirely imagined: the shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic that had become obsessed with Giffords by August 2007, before Palin had been offered the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, and before any of the proposed 'incitement', and there was never any evidence that the shooter had even seen any of Palin's supposed 'incitement'.

However, the Times slipped particularly aggressively: it revisited the claim years after it was obviously false in the piece America's Lethal Politics in 2017, arguing that the link to Palin's political incitement was extremely clear, unlike the then-current Congressional Baseball shooting. Not only would anyone remotely familiar with the case know that was false, claims in the piece America's Lethal Politics were in direct contradiction with the link used to support those claims, and/or with other claims in the same paper, or other sites under the Times umbrella. While these were corrected eventually in the most dismissive manner possible, the organization never actually apologized to Palin or made clear that the statements about Palin specifically were false: even the current piece just sputters off a correction that never mentions her name and a main piece that now merely points and winks when it says "... in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established".

In 2017, Palin brought a lawsuit for defamation. This Did Not Go Well. The district court first held that Palin would have to prove impossible claims and dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice. After an appeals court overturned that dismissal, New York State 'refined' its law so that defamation lawsuits became harder and more financially risky to bring; the trial court held this applied retroactively. The same district court then had an actual trial, where the same judge refused to allow a wide variety of relevant information in as evidence, required again that Palin prove a novel and impossible standard -- that the Times' editor not only knew the claim was false, but that it was defamatory -- and eventually dismissed the case while the jury were deliberating. Some number of the jurors received phone notifications of that dismissal while they were deliberating.

As a result, the appeals court has ordered Mrs. Palin a new trial.

It's... not clear how much this is gonna matter, though. Yes, Palin can demonstrate that the New York Times knew or should have known that the claims were false, and that being accused of inciting a assassin-turned-child-murderer is defamatory, while the defense is stuck with "owo, we fowgot". And yes, that's the traditional understanding of what it takes to defame even a public figure. But that's not what actually wins a court case, and when it comes to the things that do:

... while the voir dire proceeding in this case was atypically limited, it was not “so demonstrably brief” that it prevented counsel from “draw[ing] any conclusions about a potential juror[].” The district court questioned prospective jurors about what they and their partners did for a living and what county or borough they lived in. Although minimal to the point of being borderline insufficient, these questions provided at least some context for counsel to draw upon. While the additional voir dire questions that Palin proposed “might have been helpful to [her] in deciding how to exercise [her] peremptory challenges, we conclude that [their] absence did not render [the] trial ‘fundamentally unfair.’”...

The district court was initially misled on this point by defendants’ counsel, who insisted that “[t]he Daily Dish was a separate website,” such that Bennet’s statement in his deposition that he “consum[ed]” The Atlantic’s website would not support a conclusion that Bennet encountered any Daily Dish articles.

That is, all Palin must do is prove to twelve jurors the contents of a New York Times editors brain the better part of a decade ago, in a jurisdiction where the state has already retroactively changed statutes to make this trial harder, in front of a judge that has repeatedly made errors going on direction, while the defendant openly misleads the court, with the bare minimum opportunity to reduce bias on the part of jurors selected from part of the country heavily opposed to Palin. That trial -- maybe happening in mid-2025 -- in the exceptionally unlikely chance Palin and her legal team do win, will still do nearly bupkiss in actually making anyone whole or seriously discouraging the Times from making shit up; given reporting on the earlier 'victory' for the Times, it probably won't even persuade anyone not already certain of it that the Times was making shit up.

There's a lot of fun comparisons, of better and worse validity, to other recent defamation lawsuits, but I think they're a bit of a distraction. I tell that story so I can tell this one:

Trump v. Hostages

The former president allegedly made the call on August 14, according to Axios, and repeated in Reuters, which cited two unnamed "U.S. sources who were briefed on the call."

This claim was reported again by PBS host Judy Woodruff on Tuesday, who said, "the reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the PM of Israel urging him not to cut a deal right now because it's believed that would help the Harris campaign."

Big, if true! There's long been rumors about Reagan delaying recuse of hostages from Iran or Nixon sinking Vietnam-era peace talks, although they tend to end up just shy of conspiracy theory only because Dem cranks don't count. Someone like Trump doing it, in the middle of a war with tens of thousands of casualties and over a hundred corpses hostages, some American? With people willing to give first-hand knowledge of it?

And then the other shoe drops:

Woodruff, during PBS’ Democratic national convention coverage on Monday, repeated a story she had read in Axios and Reuters that Trump had allegedly been encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to put off peace talks until after the U.S. election in the belief that a deal could help Democrat Kamala Harris’ campaign.

But Woodruff said in a post on X on Wednesday that she had not seen later reporting that the story had been denied by the Trump campaign and Israel.

That post reads, in full:

I want to clarify my remarks on the PBS News special on Monday night about the ongoing cease fire talks in the Middle East. As I said, this was not based on my original reporting; I was referring to reports I had read, in Axios and Reuters, about former President Trump having spoken to the Israeli Prime Minister. In the live TV moment, I repeated the story because I hadn't seen later reporting that both sides denied it. This was a mistake and I apologize for it.

There's a bit of a missing note, here: the problem isn't just that the Trump or Netanhayhu offices denied it -- they would, after all -- it's that she made it up, herself. Neither the original Axios or Reuters articles even imply that Trump has encouraged Netanyahu or other Israeli politicians to delay any deals of any kind. Indeed the Axios story managed to say the exact opposite:

"One source said Trump's call was intended to encourage Netanyahu to take the deal, but stressed he didn't know if this is indeed what the former president told Netanyahu."

Woodruff will, of course, suffer absolutely zero for making up a fat fib in the middle of a major media discussion on national news. But don't worry, we have really strong true-finding tools, right? Oh, no, they just need people to prove a negative or 'unproven' is all we get. Hope that won't be a problem!

Attempted Assassins v. FBI

"Extensive analysis of the subject’s online search history as well as his specific online activity has provided us valuable insight into his mindset, but not a definitive motive,” Kevin Rojek, the head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office, told reporters Wednesday. So far, he added, the FBI sees “no definitive ideology … either left-leaning or right-leaning” associated with the shooter...

Which is kinda fascinating, given that the FBI sent out a wide variety of Emergency Disclosure Requests for accounts supposedly tied to the shooter, including a Gab account tied to the man was filled with progressive-aligned trolling, which the FBI lumped into the "the general absence of other information to date from social media". It'd be fascinating to know if that means that the FBI believes this Gab account wasn't the shooter's at all, or if anyone else with other accounts tied to him got EDR'd.

Too bad! And we're not gonna find out.

The FBI also released some photos of the shooter's gear; those that remember early testimony by the FBI about a 'collapsible' stock making it hard to notice while the shooter was walking on the ground can now know (again) that FBI Directory Wray is a moron.

Trump v. Arlington National Cemetery

On Monday, Donald Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery with a number of 'Gold Star' families, close relatives of those who died in service to the United States military, in this case the Abbey Gate bombing during the Afghanistan withdrawal. To borrow from Douglas Adams, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

The US Army issued a stark rebuke of former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over the incident on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, saying in a statement on Thursday that participants in the ceremony “were made aware of federal laws” regarding political activity at the cemetery, and “abruptly pushed aside” an employee of the cemetery.

“Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,” the Army spokesperson said in the statement on Thursday. Section 60 is an area in the cemetery largely reserved for the graves of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve,” the statement said.

The Army spokesperson said while the incident was reported to the police department at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, the employee in question “decided not to press charges” so the Army “considers this matter closed.”

I'm not a particular fan of using gravestones as political props, in a lot of the same ways that I'm not a huge fan of parents dressing their kids up as political props, and because Trump, this manages to be DARE-level incompetence at doing it, too. On the other hand, I'm also stuck in this world, where politicians taking media from military cemeteries for political ads has both long been tolerated and long been ugly and partisan, without it becoming a national news story or involving physical confrontations that get reported to police. Trying to track down the actual authority or past enforcement for the rule ends up finding 'something something Hatch act', which is just shy of Logan Act for a red flag for incoming inconsistent application.

Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting.

But it'd be real nice to have a way to tell. Too bad!

Among the things with your summary about Palin v. The New York Times that strike me the most, is how is this the same state where Trump got sued for defamation when a woman accused him of raping her, and he said he didn't do it? I'm sure some lawyer will come in here and explain in detail the twist and turns of each trial, and how specific statutes effected one or the other. But I'm so completely past that. If there is any justification in law for these massively disparate outcomes, that law is illegitimate.

how is this the same state where Trump got sued for defamation when a woman accused him of raping her, and he said he didn't do it?

Don’t make me tap the sign

Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting.

This reply to your comment made me curious because I had not read anything about the trans Nashville shooter in a while. I encountered several articles about the manifesto "leaks" but I couldn't actually find anything specific until I ended up here. "One America News" does not inspire confidence! But even after law enforcement confirmed the authenticity of the leaks, the mainstream media declined to actually publish the confirmed-true information in the leaks.

So it seems increasingly to be the case that sites like DailyCaller and OAN are more trustworthy than the New York Times, CNN, etc. Not that OAN isn't obviously slanted reporting--it is!--but there are clearly a huge number of meaningful facts that the mainstream corporate press simply refuses to report on, for transparently ideological reasons.

I can't seem to think of any reaction to this development, and specifically to your post, beyond simple despair. The machinery of the civilization in which I live has been, broadly speaking, pretty good to me. I have a reasonably comfortable life, an interesting job, ample leisure. But that same machinery seems to have turned actively hostile toward the possibility that my children or grandchildren should be afforded similar opportunities--in particular, the opportunity to live in a pluralistic society. Ideological orthodoxy is all the rage, and I increasingly cannot shake the concern that Something Is Breaking.

There ought to be a name for this effect where the supposedly trustworthy institutions lie so obviously and so much that you end up having to listen to Alex Jones tier lunacy to get any real information on some topic.

Especially since it's so common these days.

I believe those institutions call it "misinformation", but there has to be a term for it that isn't loaded in favor of either total epistemic collapse or total submission to propaganda.

I thought we were calling it 'the "Alex Jones was right" jar'.

Heh, I guess that one works.

How about the trans school shooter's manifesto that can't be released because of copyright?

At this point I have to wonder what could possibly be written there, that they are so defensive about it. If Trump's shooting got effectively moved on from like nothing ever happened, so can this manifesto.

Given that it's actually the school that owns the copyright (apparently "sorry our daughter killed your family, here's the copyright to her writings" is a thing now...), my guess is that there's discussions of the school environment in her writings that the school believes would be damaging, even if the ground truth is actually anodyne.

Even very light discussion of "my school didn't affirm my gender identity and led me through Unfixable Trauma, they're horrible homophobes and transphobes" could very easily rile up the rainbow mafia against them. From what we've seen of her writings, and especially considering she hated these people enough to kill them in cold blood, my guess is she wasn't afraid to call them all sorts of evil names and accuse them of all kinds of wickedness. It would be even more damaging if we set aside my assumption of good faith on the part of my ingroup and assume these accusations were of genuinely terrible things that really happened.

I don't think this is an action by the woke mob, I think it's an action in defense against the woke mob. Given that the parents who transferred the rights to the school liked it enough to send their child to there, I expect that their action was in solidarity with them.

Everything we've seen about the shooter screams 'batshit crazy'. There's probably some mix of true and hallucinated misdeeds. Probably the true ones are relatively small potatoes but so easy to confirm that it makes the hallucinated ones look true.

Or at least that would be my assumption.

Given that it's actually the school that owns the copyright (apparently "sorry our daughter killed your family, here's the copyright to her writings" is a thing now...), my guess is that there's discussions of the school environment in her writings that the school believes would be damaging, even if the ground truth is actually anodyne.

Sure, but more importantly, what was in there that made "them" defensive enough to give the copyright to the school in the first place? That's the more relevant question.

I don't think it's anything we'd find surprising.

The narrative around its release would fall on political lines, the right would know she wanted dead kids, the online left would say with varying couching the kids deserved it, the establishment would focus at best on some random point about the essay while they continued the exact rhetoric they put out following the shooting: "Psycho murders multiple children, trans most affected." Especially if there are likely superficially true but substantively false allegations about abuse by the school.

I think if it were some astonishing new low in depravity we'd have read it, so we have read it, in the gestalt. It could be a rare bit of wise realism. Nothing will be gained from litigating her words, let the dead rest.

It was a good strategic move. If the parents of the killer had tried to keep them out of the press, they would have failed.

Regardless of what's in them, I would imagine the victim families would prefer it not go out and become the subject of more discussion. Regardless of their politics.

Are the ideological motivations of spree killers politically relevant, or are they irrelevant?

If they're irrelevant, then how do we stop Blue Tribe from pretending otherwise when they find it convenient to do so?

If they're relevant, then how do we stop Blue Tribe from pretending otherwise when they find it convenient to do so?

The last several years have seen multiple spree killings and attempted spree killings directly motivated by Blue Tribe ideology. The Dallas police shooting, the congressional baseball shooting, and this case here are three examples. None of them have actually been taken seriously as ideologically-motivated killings by the culture generally; I see no indication that people actually remember that they happened. By contrast, numerous spree killings have been attributed to Red Tribe ideology, even when that attribution was preposterous, as in the case of the Giffords shooting.

It seems to me that this is a serious, chronic problem. I see no indication that anyone has any ideas for how to solve it within our existing system. I see no indication that our current system even sees it as a problem,m as opposed to a positive feature.

This is an example of why I am not in favor of maintaining the present system.

I think the less the general public knows about spree shooter’s manifestos the better. There’s at least some evidence that spree shooting can be contagious much like suicides and so the less sensational the reports on any given shooting, the less likely the shooting is to inspire copycats. I don’t think it changes if the motives are political.

I do think there’s a place for experts to study the motivations of spree shooters. I want cops and schools aware of the commonalities between the events, likely motivations, and best practices for preventing them or mitigating the damage during those kinds of events l.

This seems like a reasonable position as far as it goes. How do we address the problem of people blaming spree killings on their political opponents? Likewise, how do we solve the problem of people actively encouraging spree killings?

Honestly, I would hope and expect that the parties themselves would deal with those who are clearly and obviously calling for violence, and I would expect them to defend their own members from false accusations. I’m not sure, outside of the public refusing to support people and groups calling for violence, there’s much the general public can actually do.

As it stands, the bar for what constitutes “calling for political violence” seems pretty low. If you use a flamethrower on empty bio es labeled with the agenda of the other party, that’s now political violence. Even though no humans are in the images. With such a broad definition, almost any ad that gets attention could be accused of violence in some way. To me, if we’re going to stop “encouraging spree killings”, I think it should be done in cases where the call is real and unambiguous. You can’t curtail free speech by calling every symbolic reference to a gun violence.

Are the ideological motivations of spree killers politically relevant, or are they irrelevant?

Irrelevant. Certainly irrelevant in the sense that as little attention should be paid to them as possible. We shouldn't know the names or manifestos of people who murder children. It encourages child murder.

I hold that belief personally, but even if I didn't: I'd still defer to the actual parents of the actual Christian school kids murdered and say that if they want to keep the manifesto out of the press to protect their own sanity, then that deference seems fitting and proper. If they said that they wanted it out there, they could post it themselves on a website and there ain't shit the Blue Tribe can do about it. The motivating force behind this isn't some nebulous cabal of NYT editorial staff, it's the actual parents of the actual children.

Either way, I don't really think this is a serious, chronic problem. Paranoid schizo blue tribers tell me that black and trans people are murdered in the streets by racists, paranoid schizo red tribers tell me that white kids are regularly beaten to death in inner city school districts by bloodthirsty gangs of migrants. The issue such as it is seems to be immune to media bias, red tribers are just as likely to imagine political violence as blue tribers. Whose manifesto gets the most airtime seems less related to media bias than to how effectively they broadcast that manifesto prior to the shooting, if the trans whatever had livestreamed the shootings then it would be out there regardless of copyright.

If anything, I more associate talking about motivations with Red Tribe speakers post-shooting, the Blue Tribe mainstream just wants to keep the focus on guns guns guns. Who cares why he did it when it offers me an opportunity to take away someone's constitutional rights?

There is definetly a chronic problem of anti white and really anti all the groups progressive dislike.

Right wingers shining a light on genuine problems suffer from actual censorship. There isn't an equivalence.

Conversely, liberals promoting completely false pictures about black epidemic of being falsely killed by polcie believe in false facts.

Lets just say for any right wing exaggeration believed or suppressed, much more truth is suppressed by censorship, or dishonestly pretending it is BS, or extremism. While conversely, progressive false narratives are dominant.

We would definitely benefit by starting to understand real problems and stop hiding facts. IIRC there were leaks about the trans shooter who did it motivated by the pervasive antiwhite, antichristian, narrative.

The people who censor rightists talking about genuine problems like say black crime, or any other of the taboo topics, are contributing to creating a distorted narrative that leads to a far left extreme result. What we need is to remove from positions of power people who suppress such issue, and promote false narratives, over those who would promote the truth.

Could implicate some LGBTQ NGO that receives government funding in providing aid and/or radicalizing them.

The copyright is owned by the school. My guess is it spits a mix of true and false accusations against the school and/or denomination which are impossible to disentangle.

Full lyrics to multiple Linkin Park albums. Or whatever the kids listen to these days.

Yeah, that thread by Trace was a good breakdown.

For those of you who have never been, the Arlington Cemetary folks and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier guards in particular are extremists. Just utter head cases. It's an incredibly hard position to get, requiring utter fanaticism about the army, yet simultaneously is so theatrical and useless, pseudo-monastic.

Since 1948, the tomb guards, a special platoon within the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), work on a team rotation of 24 hours on, 24 hours off, for five days, taking the following four days off. A guard takes an average of six hours to prepare his uniform—heavy wool, regardless of the time of year—for the next day's work. In addition to preparing the uniform, guards also conduct physical training, tomb guard training, participate in field exercises, cut their hair before the next workday, and at times are involved in regimental functions as well. Tomb guards are required to memorize 35 pages of information about Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the locations of nearly 300 graves and who is buried in each one.

I remember thinking as a scout, when the whole routine was explained to us, that if I loved the army that much I would really want to be in Afghanistan wouldn't I*?

So this is probably a case of poor advance work that has plagued the Trump campaign all through 2024, running directly into people whose entire day consists of enforcing petty and absurd regulations as sacred traditions. They take this kind of thing extremely seriously, Trump takes nothing seriously, it's tossing a Mentos into a coke bottle.

Why Democrats are even bothering this time is totally insane to me. Lucy and the football vibes. I hate this game we all play where we pretend that someone, somewhere would be offended by this, even though I personally don't really care. But somebody is super mad! It never works out.

*My dad, when discussing this, mentioned a friend of his from college who joined the marines and was posted as a guard at the white house. He kept trying to get sent to Vietnam, and his requests kept getting denied because, supposedly, his CO told him: "You're tall, you're white, you're good looking, you show up, you don't do drugs. I can send anybody to Vietnam, but I can't replace you here."

Since 1948, the tomb guards, a special platoon within the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard), work on a team rotation of 24 hours on, 24 hours off, for five days, taking the following four days off. A guard takes an average of six hours to prepare his uniform—heavy wool, regardless of the time of year—for the next day's work. In addition to preparing the uniform, guards also conduct physical training, tomb guard training, participate in field exercises, cut their hair before the next workday, and at times are involved in regimental functions as well. Tomb guards are required to memorize 35 pages of information about Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the locations of nearly 300 graves and who is buried in each one.

When I was in Arlington many years back, I couldn't understand what the big deal was about the tomb of the unknown soldier, until I went. Pictures and video don't do it justice. There is an aura there. The way everyone is dead silent. The framing. The location. You have to walk through a quarter mile of perfectly-maintained memorial graves to get there.

Same experience, I went twice for random reasons as a kid and the reverence of the place was palpable. A mix of reverence, seriousness, glory, order, stability… it’s actually one of the more interesting places to go because these moods are rare in America. If I lived nearby I would through it frequently.

Re the above —

yet simultaneously is so theatrical and useless, pseudo-monastic”

The costly, theatrical, monastic signal is extremely useful for inculcating values. If cathedrals were made of painted cardboard they wouldn’t be so interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_Cathedral

I tend to agree. One can see the clash of sensibilities in a Trump campaign visit from miles away.

The reports seem to indicate the dispute was between the Trump staff and a wagie at the facility, not a ceremonial guard. The person is always referred to a "staff," "employee," or "worker" in all of the fake news reports.

Any of the "Army officials" are of course not from the fanatical guard either, but political operatives in the media department.

Civilian staff at Arlington are also nuts, just a little less nuts than the guards.

Not personally being guardsmen does not preclude them from fanaticism about the pomerium of the tomb of the unknown soldier.

pomerium

Huh. I learned a word today.

It does make you wonder what kind of person joins the army to stand in front of a big rock all day. Then again that's apparently not too far off from what some of the regular grunts do.

Low morale, or what soldiers called a sense of purposelessness, was palpable. “Sometimes we sat around and joked all day about killing ourselves,” says a platoonmate of Valley’s who recently left the Army. “I mean, we were all depressed. Everyone in the Army is depressed.”. Fun times all around in the post-afghanistan military.

Why Democrats are even bothering this time is totally insane to me. Lucy and the football vibes.

Seems like a pretty expected response to the attacks on Walz for saying he carried weapons in war. Goose, gander, and we all get stupider.

They've tried this over and over and it's never worked. Trump says the dead soldiers are suckers, Trump says the presidential medal of freedom he gives donors is better than the MoH because you don't have to get shot, Trump says McCain was a loser because he got captured. Liberals get on their high horse, nobody is persuaded of anything.

Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside,”

Obviously the Army can regulate uniformed soldiers, but it does not seem that the statute (or any ensuing reg) can specifically single out political or campaign-related speech, since that would be a content-based restriction. Congress could (directly or through authorizing regulation) prohibit all speeches within the cemetery, since that would be a neutral time-place-manner restriction.

Of course the left "he broke the law" folks are just banging that drum without thinking through whether the law is even plausibly constitutional.

My take would probably be to ban all these shenanigans without distinction. For one, that's in line with our constitutional tradition of not distinguishing between speech on different topics, but also because none of that shit belongs in a cemetery for fallen soldiers.

On one hand, I appreciate the decorum of not politicizing national cemeteries. On the other, I appreciate your Constitutional argument, and it seems like we live in a time in which everything ("the personal," as the kids say) is political. Most wouldn't object to the President attending a ceremony at Arlington and giving a speech (indeed, this seems like a pretty regular occurrence), and the Right seems to have dug up campaign ads he's used in the past featuring national cemeteries. If we're not careful, the rule will quickly spiral in practice into "the President's political opponents are not allowed to attend ceremonies on public grounds," which feels very autocratic.

In practice, I don't really come off liking either side here: Trump seems to be pulling a political stunt on hallowed ground. On the other, Biden seems unbothered to attend to the families of soldiers sent to their deaths on his orders three years ago. I haven't read Trump's remarks, so it's possible the only direct politicizing was implicitly by Biden's absence, although from what I know of the man that seems unlikely.

Honestly, I am, for once, appreciating that other countries like the UK have a (mostly) non-political head of state (The Queen) that can attend to such things.

the UK have a (mostly) non-political head of state (The Queen) that can attend to such things.

Boy, do I have bad news for you.

I chose The Queen as the example because I wasn't really sure if Charles has acquired the same "beloved, apolitical voice of patriotic respect" that she had yet. But I'd be curious to hear from any of his subjects that have an opinion on that.

Charles III was somewhat politically active as the King-in-waiting (Prince of Wales).

He was never as political as Prince Harry, and never expressed opinions on live-wire issues like race, socialism, immigration etc. But he had a bunch of pro organic farming initiatives and youth schemes, plus low-key campaigning against GM crops. He also once personally intervened to stop the Saudis building a godawful modern monstrosity in London, persuading them to go for something more classical.

In general, King Charles was more political as a prince precisely because he knew he would have to be impartial once he became king. Now that he is King, he’s been much more careful. He’s never going to be Elizabeth II because he doesn’t have 50 years of rule going for him, but I’d say he’s broadly respected.

The problem has been more from PMs abusing him - Rishi Sunak signed a controversial Brexit-related deal practically on his doorstep before then getting Charles to have tea with the relevant signatories, in order to imply the deal had Royal assent and give it more power.

I guess prior to recent decades, everyone occupying or campaigning for that office had the sense not to pull a political stunt on hallowed ground. That practice didn't spiral out of control.

Palin v. The New York Times

Is this basically all that bullshit about the crosshairs map? That's all I can recall.

You know, I’d been oddly curious about the Crooks rifle. Canted sights! I’m surprised he didn’t have a tac light.

At least now we know that the reporting of iron sights was premature.

Did you get the right link for “dressing up their kids as political props?” It’s currently a tweet about “Let’s Go Brandon” as political speech.

The plaintiffs in that case were a pair of middle schoolers and their parents. While the kids were old enough to ditch the sweatshirts and seemed like they were probably wanting to play along, it was still near-certainly the parents providing the sweatshirts and idea.

At least now we know that the reporting of iron sights was premature.

It is always interesting how people insane enough to do things like this are also terrible at selecting their tools (which is fortunate).

Had he actually bothered to buy some magnification things would almost certainly be quite different now; even a cheap, modern fixed 3x-5x is sufficiently magical that it can turn all misses into all hits in a course of fire at similar distance and targets about that size.

I'm not a gun expert, but is there a risk that if the scoped got knocked in transport he'd need to re-zero it?

No. This isn’t a thing hunters worry about and they have far tougher terrain to climb over.

not really, no. There's a level of force at which you might lose zero, but my guess would be that you'd be equally likely to smash the glass or damage the rifle. Normal handling won't do it.

Very unlikely, especially unlikely it'd be noticeable given the distance. Even shitty chinesium scopes hold zero decently these days. Whatever he'd be able to get off the shelf for his budget DPMS would work just fine after that light climbing.

Possible but unlikely.

Think “swappable drill bit.” Easy enough to unscrew in the proper direction, but not prone to misalignment. Metal tightly gripping metal.

For those interested, we now have images and documentation on the other attempted assassin's rifle. It's... uh, a thing.

If you haven't already read it, this excellent article about "stochastic terrorism" uses the charges of incitement levelled against Palin as a jumping-off point to discuss how inconsistently the concept is applied (https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/stochastic-terrorism-a-game-of-rhetorical). After the Trump assassination attempt it's arguably even more relevant now than when it was first published.

Is this the correct link? https://drrollergator.substack.com/p/stochastic-terrorism-a-game-of-rhetorical

Yes thank you, I don't know why Substack links haven't been copying across properly lately. Updated.

I'm also stuck in this world, where politicians taking media from military cemeteries for political ads has both long been tolerated

The link you provide shows an image from a video, and when you watch the video it has in a tiny font a disclaimer that the use of DoD images does not inply any endorsement.

From what I understand, Bthe law prohibits use of private photogs for campaign activities on the cemetary grounds.

So it seems that there is a minute, and trivial difference.

I wonder why Trump didn't just use the DoD footage from all the times he visited Arlington as president?

EDIT: if you'd like a more recent and undisclaimered example, this was from 2021.

From what I understand, the law prohibits use of private photogs for campaign activities on the cemetary grounds.

Which would be fascinating, given the official Army response was not that the photographers were specifically the problem, but that regulations "clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds". And no one at the Army is pointing to the specific rule either way directly.

Some other groups have pointed to CFR 32-553.32, but that doesn't care at all about photographers, and depends on a ludicrously vague definition of 'partisan political activity' (here, largely devolving into "but Trump"), and the regulation allows nothing more than the ANC's Executive Director to ban someone, which can't be delegated. Worse, the Trump campaign claims to have gotten explicit permission from Arlington beforehand, albeit. The closest I can find for an actual statutory, rather than regulatory, prohibition is one on demonstrations separate from ceremonies, which doesn't apply here. Others point to the Hatch Act, but that applies more to use of video and imagery taken during a political career -- the Hatch Act excludes the President and VP, but doesn't allow everyone working under their orders a Get Out of Hatch Jail Free Card.

((Uh, overlooking the bit where the Hatch Act is also basically unenforced.))

I wonder why Trump didn't just use the DoD footage from all the times he visited Arlington as president?

No small part of the point of this particular circus is to highlight the Abbey Gate families, and implicitly that the Biden-Harris administration has generally not met with or supported them. Since Abbey Gate happened in August 2021, that would be after Trump left the Presidency.

But the letters of the law and regulations don't matter. They can always fall back to "norms", and if you point to Democrats doing the same thing, they can always find or fabricate a distinguisher. What matters is control of the press, which the Democrats have, so this is spun as "Trump campaign violates rules by using Arlington National Cemetery for a photo-op and brutalizes totally innocent non-partisan employee who tries to stop them". And that's the pravda.

“No using cemetery grounds for political campaign purposes” doesn’t seem like “a ludicrously vague definition of 'partisan political activity'” to me.

Also, are there prior instances of political campaigning in that same spot that were ignored? If not, is it not reasonable for Arlington cemetery staff to enforce cemetery-specific norms and rules regardless of what laws have been explicitly passed?

The 2021 example linked above was specifically Biden in the same section of Arlington. And I can give more.

Ah I missed that edit. Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for.

Although I don’t see how your latest link in this comment is an example of Democrat hypocrisy.

I am not able to find the source I saw last night saying that the private photog was an issue in the law, but for what it's worth Trump's campaign made it a point that their photog was allowed in.

"The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump's team during a very solemn ceremony," Cheung said in the statement.

I doubt very much this issue actually gathers any steam. But if it'd did, I'm guessing a lot of the juice would be around the permission Trump's campaign has claimed to have gotten.

re: the palin thing i think everyone should have free reign to defame politicians. if you are a politician then this is just a negative you need to suck up. i think the alternative that courts are adjudicating the line between free speech and defamation around politicians is much worse. i strongly suspect courts are just going to push the thumb on the scale to protect 'good' politicians and harm 'bad' politicians.

We already have a problem with smart, sane people staying the hell away from politics -- this would make it worse.

You are trying to remake politics in the image of academia. That won't work. Politics is a much more important and foundational human institution than academia. What is needed here are hustlers and grifters, the Saul Goodman types, not scientists or engineers.

I'm not trying to do anything of the kind, I'm well aware of issues with academia.

I have some experience with local politics and I'm telling you one of the biggest challenges is getting good people to run. Anyone who is remotely sane or competent wants nothing to do with politics.

Academia has too much fraudsters it self. What we need is less people like that anywhere, especially in important fields while still be wise to their tricks. So maybe a few reformed ones to catch the unreformed ones.

I don't disagree that we should look at how things would be applied at the time. And we shouldn't abandon being tactical in that case. So of course, I don't suggest giving more power to people who would abuse it. And it is true that the current elites anywhere, do abuse it in the direction you say. In general the freedom to say unpopular truths must include some possibility of getting things wrong.

But in an ideal sense, we would be better off if journalism and the media took defamation seriously, not in their two tier hypocritical pretense way that it would be used to enforce defamation they like, and silence accurate and exaggerations they dislike. A media that adhered to actual principles in a manner that they told the truth 100% is an impossibility, but something better than today is a possibility. And it would require changing the kind of people running the media and enforcing to them standards.

But sure part of this, can be more freedom of speech and less shutting them down, or in fact arresting, those promoting a different narrative outside of the bubble of the media that promote the same narrative, and often controlled by the same people.

That'd be a fun norm, but :

  • It'd be nice to have some other actual way to find truth from trustworthy sources, unless you want the inevitable LBJisms to be indistinguishable from actual pigfuckers. And we don't have such sources.
  • There demonstrably already are exceptions. At minimum, we have a Kari Lake exclusion, and more seriously a large portion of plausible threats that are so deadly not even complete morons risk them.
  • Palin was not a politician in 2017: she resigned from the Alaskan governorship in 2009, and would not join another political race until 2022 (which she lost).

I'd go one step further and say that everyone should be free to defame, simpliciter. I should be free to spread vicious rumors about my neighbors without fear of legal consequences. (The only things that could hold me back are social and/or moral concerns).

As a free speech absolutist, I'd be even in favor of allowing people to issue true threats against each other without fear of legal consequences, as long as they don't make good on those threats.

Wake up babe, the definition of woman just dropped.

The year was 2020, trans issues have already made their way through our social consciousness, and some women were getting frustrated at the inability to congregate without trans women showing up, and - in the minds of the TERF inclined - spoil the party.

Enter Sall Grover, a bold enterprising spirit, that recognized two facts:

She quickly joined the dots, and thus the Giggle app was born. In order to register you had to upload a selfie, which would be run through a sex-recognition AI, and non-females would be automatically rejected. The AI was deliberately calibrated to minimize false negatives, wanting to spare cis-women the humiliation of appealing the process, Grover figured it's better to let a few false-positives through and deal with them manually. For a while, the whole system worked wonderfully, and the women congregated, giggling happily.

But, as we all know, there is no Giggle without a Tickle... In February 2021, Roxy Tickle uploaded a selfie to the Giggle app and the AI was so amused at the word pun, it forgot it was supposed to be an image recognition algorithm. Roxy got through! Her joy lasted for several months, until she was caught by manual review as she was applying for premium features of the app. After a short and unsuccessful appeal attempt, she decided that the only way to resolve this dispute is in court.

Roxy Tickle argued that this was an outrageous injustice, that she was being discriminated against for being trans, and that this constitutes a violation of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. Sall Grover argued that this is nonsense, that Giggle does not discriminate against trans people, it merely excludes people on the basis of sex. The law hasn't outlawed sex-segregated spaces over the 30 years it was in effect, Roxy Tickle was treated no different than any other male-sexed individual, and therefore no illegal discrimination has taken place. The judge had to rule if Giggle excluded a man, and was well within it's rights, or if it excluded a woman and indirectly committed discrimination against a trans person. He was therefore forced to settle that ancient question - what is a woman? Last week we finally received the verdict, and the way I understood it is "a woman is anyone who the state identifies as a woman". It turns out that sex is mutable, and that Ms. Tickle is a woman because she has a state issued document saying so. Australia's legal system seems a bit complex to my eyes, but at first glance that seems to also boil down to "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman".

The consequences of the verdict might be more interesting than the verdict itself. After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.? We've covered enough of these cases over the years that I think it should be clear this isn't a hypothetical, and as connoisseurs of TERF content will know, hacking "gender violence" laws has become a pretty regular occurance in countries that lean on the self-ID side of the debate. More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average. In any case, if any such self-ID laws / rulings are to be maintained, I think they'll require some major qualifications.

I just want to say, on behalf of all the kooks that said that government issue id cards were a slippery slope, that we fucking told you so.

It starts with one bit of information on a piece of paper and eventually you have administrations forced to adjudicate the metaphysics of identity.

We can't have nice things, because nice things always turn into the Total State.

I don’t disagree, but if you have mass (illegal) immigration you must also have government issue IDs, because otherwise there’s no way to tell who is a citizen and who is not.

I mean there's always the libertarian solution of not having benefits instead. But sure, once you embark on the road to serfdom all the next steps seem logical and needed.

1:

Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:

https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/

2:

The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.

What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).

That's also clear from the paragraph here:

The same evidence did, however, support the conclusion that indirect gender identity discrimination did take place. The indirect discrimination case has succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the use of the Giggle App because she did not look sufficiently female, according to the respondents.

Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.

So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:

  1. You are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of biological sex.
  2. You are allowed to discriminate based on gender identity, but only if the disadvantaged party is the one that identifies as a man.

I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?

3:

As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:

More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average.

I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.

The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.

This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.

I blame the whole concept of gender. We didn't always have gender, it's a recent invention. We used to have sex and civilization ran pretty well with that alone.

Gender was just a synonym for sex because people wanted to avoid saying sex because of the fucking connotation. We were then gaslit as if they were different.

because of the fucking connotation

I see what you did there.

And yeah, the whole gender studies "gender has always been different from sex, we have always been at war with Eurasia," thing is just retroactive claiming. I don't doubt that wacky gender idealism has been cooking in the academic pot for a long time, but the smarmy way in which progressives like to start talking about how "actually gender is different from sex and This Is Known" like we're describing electron orbitals and not human constructs is quite annoying. There's definitely a motte and Bailey going on where gender is a social construct when they need it to be and a totally reified pure science of raw material fact when that's more useful. And certainly different people believe different things on that note, each gets sold the propaganda that will convince them.

It's really obvious when you're not a native English speaker. In most languages the word for (biological) “sex” doesn't mean fucking, the same word for sex is used for grammatical gender, and there isn't a word for “gender” (these languages are now importing “gender” as a loanword to refer to the foreign concept of gender identity as distinct from biological sex, which has absolutely no basis in the native language).

Similar with the idea that male and female refer to sex while man and woman are something else (which genderists are walking back now that that battle has been won). In most Germanic languages the words male and female are literally man-like and woman-like with no implicit distinction between sex and gender identity.

It's pretty apparent even in English: the retcon split the adjectives male and female as "sex" from the nouns man and woman as "gender". There isn't really a way to describe a "gendered" person with a specific job -- "woman doctor" doesn't roll off the tongue.

I suppose this is excluding grammatically gendered nouns like actress or aviatrix that are becoming increasingly archaic at this point, although that may be the result of the proto-wokeness of last century.

In my dialect of English 'actress', 'hostess', 'waitress', etc are in common use, with a masculine generic form, and 'woman doctor' merely sounds old, not awkward. 'Woman cop' is in common use. 'She preacher' would mark you as a bit of a reactionary, but 'she-demon' is a less obscene term for bitch.

Funnily enough, "beangarda" is one of the few Irish words still in common usage even among Irish people who profess utter ignorance of the Irish language.

The Irish police force is called "Garda Síochána" (guardians of the peace) and an individual police officer is a "garda". "Bean" (pronounced "ban") means "woman" - hence "beangarda".

I wonder how true this is. In Russian the word for grammatical gender is род while the word for biological sex is пол (I don't know if people these days are using род in other ways). Male/female (самец/самка) are not used for people except in a derogatory sense, instead мужской/женский (lit. manly/womanly) is used for that. I suspect there may be a variety of approaches in different languages.

I've only seen someone use род for gender in the translation of C.S. Lewis' Perelandra (where the divine beings are sexless but gendered), but all modern discourse uses a calque, гендер.

That's interesting because I was going to bring up Lewis as a counterargument to the "gender/sex distinction recently invented to undermine gender norms" POV. Lewis discussed it extensively in both fiction and non-fiction and certainly didn't intend it to undermine gender norms. In multiple places he argued that God is infinitely masculine although not male, and that biological sex was in fact only the expression at the biological level of a more ultimate reality.

Looking forward to Russia breaking open the third axis in gender identity space.

I wouldn't say мужской/женский translates as "manly/womanly". More like those two words are "male/female (adjectives)" and calling someone самец/самка would be "a male/a female (noun)".

You're right about the parts of speech, but the point I was making is that you wouldn't call someone a самец/самка unless you're looking to insult them.

When I was a kid, I still had French and Latin textbooks that said that "gender" was a technical term in linguistics and genders were groups of things that used the same pronouns, noun declensions, verb conjugations etc. In English, grammatical gender is only relevant to pronouns. But in languages where grammatical gender is a bigger deal, it is obviously a separate concept from biological sex or the social roles around it that managed to acquire the name "gender" in English in the 2nd-wave feminist era. (At least in correct French as promoted by the Academie Francaise, grammatical gender is a property of the noun and does not change based on the biological sex of the referent, hence "Madame le Ministre" as the honorific for a female government minister).

Googling suggests that the technical grammatical sense was the only meaning of "gender" in English in the first half of the 20th century. Resources on both sides of the political fence seem to agree that the modern use begins with notorious genital mutilator and paedophile enabler John Money in the 1950's, so depending on how you define Money's views (I don't recommend going there) there is a pretty strong case that the trans movement was using the term before the feminists were.

I wonder if part of the acceptance of the modern use of "gender" is that educated English-speakers are less likely to be familiar with the grammatical meaning because formal grammar (and particularly formal French or Latin grammar) is no longer taught in schools.

I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'.

So far, nobody has answered me.

Appealing to random niche cultural sex-worker and/or designated eunuch roles to establish historical precedent seems to be the most common.

Honestly surprising nobody's tried to recast the Catholic Priesthood as a third gender.

Monks and nuns would make an even greater example. Even today, it’s not at all uncommon to come across brothers who adopted female saints’ names and sisters who adopted male saints’ names. There’s definitely a case to be made that “Father Mary Patrick” and “Sister Boniface” are at least a little gender-bendery.

The Catholic priesthood refers to itself as an uber-masculine vocation and explicitly excludes women. Priests in the roman rite aren't allowed to be married but the Catholic church does have Byzantine and Syrian rites with very similar theologies of the priesthood and married priests.

Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."

That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy, which runs: sexual dimorphism is natural, therefore (a) all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change; and (b) a society's sex-specific stereotypes are "natural" and nature is good, so women should try to perform their society's conventional stereotypes of womanhood (and men: manhood), and those who less closely match those stereotypes are unnatural and bad.

Basically, trying to circumvent the fallacies in "But you have to dress your XX baby in pink because pink is naturally for girls!"/ "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob because he supports a family, that's just the nature of things."

Unfortunately, I think this usage ran afoul of the trans folks' desire to deliberately re-conflate the natural and the social in order to argue that their social performance of gender stereotypes was, indeed, "natural," therefore biological, unchangeable and good. So whether there's a definition distinct from "sex" on that side of the aisle, I couldn't say.

Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."

I don't think that's accurate. There were different social roles and expectations for men and women, but no one referred to them using words "man" and "woman", nor were the words "male" and "female" used in any sort of contrast to "man" and woman", nor was there any sort of confusion if taking on a different role would make you a different "gender" (an anthropologist asking one of the famed "third gender" tribesmen if they consider themselves something other than a man, and hearing "are you retarded?" in response, is a thing that actually happened in real life).

That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy

Ironically it turned out that it was far less fallacious than the genderist argument. For all the attempts at "gender neutral upbringing" girls still tend to zero-in on girlie princess stuff, and boys on trucks and whatnot. Despite "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob" being cancellable and outright illegal, women still earn less money than men, etc.

an anthropologist asking one of the famed "third gender" tribesmen if they consider themselves something other than a man, and hearing "are you retarded?" in response, is a thing that actually happened in real life

You can't just drop something that funny without citing your source.

Here you go. Turns out I misremembered it, and they guy still hangs on to the sex/gender distinction, but also insists the way these obscure tribes understand it does not match how the activists are potraying it:

- Can you just share your opinion on like this attempt to blur the boundary between male and female that you see happening specifically in in the western context?

- I think there's an enormous amount of confusion about sex, what is sex, what is gender, and the two get mixed up and mashed up and the conversations very very very quickly become completely unproductive. You know in my class (...) we start off by talking about what is objectivity what, is subjectivity, what is inner subjectivity, what is sex what is gender... um so i i start the class off by really clearly defining these terms, and so i think i think an enormous amount of the confusion is just because what do people mean by sex, what do people mean by gender, and when they mean different things, or when you have two people in a dialogue, and they're using these terms differently, it just goes nowhere almost immediately.

And i as far as using Fa’fafine for example to blur the distinction between male and female sex categories i would say that that is a western project because the Fa’fafine have no doubt whatsoever what their sex is. The muxe [the Zapotec tribe's "third gender"] have no doubt whatsoever what their sex is. They know they're not... they know what their gender is... they know they're not men, and they know they're not women, but if you ask them are you... in terms of your body, are you male or female, they're like yeah... they might not say the word "male", but they're like, yeah... i'm i'm a man, i'm male... So I remember interviewing one... I mean this is how nonsensical things become, when you start translating some of this stuff into a field setting, in a non-western culture... so I remember being in southern Mexico and asking a muxe "you know, are you male or female... you know, do you have a penis or a vulva?" and she looked at me like and she actually said "are you stupid?"

The problem is that the source is a bit of a pain in the ass to cite. It was an interview with Paul L. Vasey, who originally documented the "third gender" phenomenon, and got frustrated with the way his research is brought up by trans activists. Somewhere in this or this podcast, he drops the anecdote. I can give them a relisten and ping you when I have the timestamp if you want, though I also recommend just listening to the whole thing, they're good interviews.

Ironically it turned out that it was far less fallacious than the genderist argument. For all the attempts at "gender neutral upbringing" girls still tend to zero-in on girlie princess stuff, and boys on trucks and whatnot. Despite "Sorry Jill, I can't offer you the same salary as Bob" being cancellable and outright illegal, women still earn less money than men, etc.

I mean, I'm aware of many of the checkmate-libtard! style memes on these topics, but a couple weirdos failing at their halfhearted attempts to raise ungendered children in a very gendered social world, or some women continuing to lose out in pay negotiations despite their bosses' professions of fair treatment, says virtually nothing one way or another about the optimum extent to which a well-run society should embrace, enforce or renounce differential treatment of individuals by sex. I don't really know what the "genderist argument" is, since that's not how anybody seems to label themselves in these conversation.

The "genderist argument" is that these differences are a result of socialization, and that the appeal to nature is a fallacy.

says virtually nothing one way or another about the optimum extent to which a well-run society should embrace, enforce or renounce differential treatment of individuals by sex

I agree, but that seems irrelevant to the discussion.

Historically, the distinction was "gender"= social norms for manhood and womanhood, while "sex"= biological X/Y/ gamete status. A child raised in a distant lab by sexless robot aliens, with absolutely no conception of human society, might not have a "gender"; but they would still have a "sex."

If blank slateism is true, yes.

That's kind of the problem. The ideological fortress is of use to larger groups than just the trans activist segment that captured it so now people don't have a way to disentangle themselves from ridiculousness like Tickle without losing their motte entirely. And they haven't found it because

That version of gender did have real uses as a rhetorical countermove against the sex-determinist appeal-to-nature fallacy

If they were only attacking the fallacious version of that argument then trans activists would have a thinner wedge to work with. You can accept that it's ludicrous to assume static or totalizing gender roles without accepting that gender has nothing to do with sex (which is where we are) or the sort of doctrinaire blank slateist/anti-sex-based role position that came to dominate.

If blank slateism is true, yes.

Although the sex/gender distinction is still useful even in the real world where blank slatism is true. In a sane society (i.e. one which sets up a default where men are gently steered towards being Real Men TM and women are gently steered towards being Real Women TM) gender is a structure built on top of biological sex. Some of that structure (like war being for men and child-raising for women) is close to the root and necessary, and therefore conserved across cultures. But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.

But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.

Yes. That would be the fallacious version.

Simply having the sex-vs-gender distinction implies nothing about the relationship between the two, just that they're different things worth analyzing separately, like genotype vs phenotype or wealth vs. income.

I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman. Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses). Similarly, there's an extremely good case for a presumption of blank-slatism as the best working approach to prevent grave injustice on an individual level.

Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens; and runaway gender-performance competition (like the kind the US saw in the 50s, or arguably is seeing today) is a costly Moloch-style trap that is hard to escape without externally-enforced change. So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.

Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens;

I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.

What's the upside it's supposed to have brought us?

and runaway gender-performance competition (like the kind the US saw in the 50s, or arguably is seeing today)

If we saw it in the 50's and we're seeing it today, I have to ask if the term has any meaning.

I don't know about that. Ever since we bet on interchangeability of men and women, we can't seem to reproduce ourselves and have to make up for the shortfall by importing people from more fertile parts of the world, hoping that interchangeability works out this time.

Industrial processes work best with other industrial processes, so I guess it's a race to industrialize that biology as we have various other forms of organic production. I'm not saying I'm a fan, but it's weird for a community as virtualized, urban and seemingly techno-optimist as the Motte to come down so hard in favor of artisanal methods in this single area.

The interesting and under-discussed thing is that male roles got liquidated by modernity way before female roles did. Watch some living-history documentaries about preindustrial farm life, or read about crime in early cities and roads, and it becomes extremely obvious why it would be helpful to have someone around who's taller with a lot of upper-body strength and greater potential for physical aggression, and why a smaller-bodied person might willingly relinquish a certain amount of autonomy to retain that alliance. Once men deliberately technologize themselves out of the hard-labor-and-physical-defense game, to which their biology is naturally suited, it becomes much easier for women to look at their desk-jockey vidya-playing husbands and brothers and ask why they get to demand so much and give so little in return.

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I also think doctrinaire blank-slateism as you describe it is a bit of a strawman.

Strawman or the bailey?

If that view is a strawman then what is 'all sex-specific social expectations and privileges are also "natural" and can never be changed because duh, biology doesn't change'. How many American conservatives explicitly state this belief?

Most of the instances I'm aware of sound more like (entirely reasonable) calls for for agnosticism or at least extreme skepticism about the precise extent to which biology determines culture (since everyone opining has serious skin in the game and we're certainly not at the point of making controlled experiments that could falsify our guesses).

If it was mere agnosticism or even skepticism people like James Damore wouldn't be anathematized for trying to provide empirical evidence that challenged the blank slateist ideology.

Yes, everyone knows the caveats to the statement "men and women are the same". But it's hardly my fault that we continually allow some people to turn the ratchet in one direction until we're now arguing about men in women's sports. If there was any example even blank slateists should laugh off...it used to be this. But, seemingly, what one generation knows but considers too obvious or impolite to say somehow stops being common knowledge and you have to fight about it.

"Everyone knows" is true until it's not. The slope is slippery. I don't consider it a weakness of my argument so much as the point itself.

Moreover, liberal modernity certainly works much better with fully interchangeable workers/citizens

As @ArjinFerman asks: in what sense? It certainly has certain Darwinian implications. The liberal societies that have adopted this viewpoint are facing the basic problem of being unable to reproduce themselves - which probably won't be helped by telling men and women they can swap sex and dope themselves to make it stick. The flight may feel smoother but the plane hasn't landed yet.

My other retort is that this view is simply just false, and it only appears not-false insofar as people employ a bunch of hotfixes and participate in the very sort of doctrinaire "see no evil" blank slateism you're writing off as strawmen.

There are plenty of places where it's clear people are not interchangeable widgets and we solve it by various forms of redistribution that are intended to push them to look and act more alike (enforcing equal parental leave in European countries) and the deployment of a vast bureaucracy to root out sexual "bias" or "discrimination" across both employment and education and the burning of a witch every so often that points out this truth.

As a child of this period, it's hard to escape the view that this is much preferable to the alternative (certainly it's in my interests when we come to the racial version of it) but it's hard to argue it doesn't impose all sorts of costs.

So at a societal level I can fully understand advocating for periodic centrally-enforced sex-stereotype detoxes or elimination diets, just to reset to minimal levels.

Even if I accepted this as some worthy goal, I don't see how what's happening is some sort of stereotype of rationalist ChiCom planning with ten year plans to tap and reduce standard sex stereotyping (you'd think, if people were interchangeable widgets such totalitarianism would be unneeded).

Some of the tools used are products of the center but I don't see any retrenchment. Just various groups of people seizing Title IX or this or that handle of a ratchet and taking us further and further.

There's no, as far as I can see, cultural movement in the center that goes "maybe we don't need female Marines so leave standards as-is" or "maybe get male Secret Service agents, cause we're all fucked if the bullet skips past someone's 5'6 head into their principal's chest". Nope, some moral entrepreneur will find some new thing to be the first to diversify, and then we go from mere detox to imposing things like gender identity on schools.

(Hello! I'm new here and this is my first post, so apologies if I'm messing up any social norms here. Please feel free to call me out! :))

That seems like a pretty easy challenge. Here's my definitions:

External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".

Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.

Sex: the biological reality. A messy mix of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.

Hello, welcome to the Motte.

Putting cards on the table here, I was a little suspicious of you (not many people just independently "discover" us, and announcing yourself with a username guaranteed to set off a lot of folks here is a little suspicious), but I appreciate the discussion you have generated so far, and I will go with my presumption of good faith. Genuinely, I would like to see more posters like you.

So as you have probably figured out by now, the majority of people here are... not very friendly to trans identities. This ranges from "Thinks trans women are men but don't feel a need to start fights over it" to "Believes trans women are all AGP perverts who should be mocked and shunned and they really want you to know it."

Our rules require everyone to be treated civilly, so no is allowed to directly insult you just for being trans or advancing trans views, but nonetheless you probably will receive some vigorous challenges, so I hope you are prepared for that and have a thick skin. I am being sincere here - I would like you to be able to stick around despite what you will probably perceive as an adversarial environment. Because this is also one of the few places on the Internet where people are allowed to say "Trans women are men" without being banned.

Which, bringing this around to my point, is part of the reason even many more moderate folks like myself have become, if not radicalized, then rather more hostile to trans people than we once were. Putting cards on the table again, my own personal opinion is that gender dysphoria is real and I think people should be allowed to live and identify as they wish, but they shouldn't be able to force other people to accept their internal identification as biological reality. More concretely, I think people should address you as "Ma'am" out of politeness and people who go out of their way to "misgender" you are being hostile assholes. But most people don't really believe you're a woman and you shouldn't expect them to feel obligated to update their mental model on demand, nor should you try to sniff out signs of heresy (i.e., clues that they don't actually think of you as a woman, for which you would then try to socially punish them). I am not saying you do this - but many trans people do do this, and that is the cause of the much of the present hostility towards trans people.

In my opinion, until a decade or so ago, most people (at least on the liberal side) were much more accepting of trans identity because trans people sold themselves the way gay people did - "We just want to be left alone to live our lives in peace." Which is no doubt true of most trans people! But then we started seeing increasing pressure not just to accept, but to validate. Increasing demands to proactively affirm that we really, really see you as a woman, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a hateful bigot. Then came trans women who used to be mediocre middle aged male athletes suddenly joining a woman's sports league and crushing lifetime competitors. Trans women who were men until five minutes after their conviction for a violent sex felony, whereupon they discovered their female identity and a need to be housed in women's prisons. Trans women who really want to show off their erections in women's locker rooms and force low-wage immigrant women to wax their female balls. Trans women who transition after a lifetime of being a husband and a father and dress like minimal-effort clowns while representing the US government. Trans women who want you to be fired if you won't put pronouns in your email signature.

These are undoubtedly a tiny minority of trans people. But it doesn't take very many bad actors to cause a lot of disturbance and distress, and more importantly, the reaction from the trans community has been largely, not acknowledgment that there are bad actors and maybe it's appropriate to not assume "good faith" on the part of every single man who suddenly realizes he's a woman in his 50s. Not to allow us to apply some... gatekeeping and to acknowledge that biological sex is a thing and you can let trans women live as women and be polite to them without letting them compete against women in the Olympics. But instead, to double down on all these issues and say "No, a trans woman is a real biological woman and should be able to show off their female penis in front of teenage girls, should be able to beat up women in sports, should be able to share a cell with women in a prison."

And that... is why I personally have lost a lot of my sympathy for the trans movement. I still am polite to trans people I know personally. I would use your preferred name and pronouns in person. Even though I would not actually think of you as a woman. And I would treat you as a very dangerous person to interact with, socially and professionally, on the assumption that a slip on my part would result in you trying to bring down sanctions upon me.

I am interested in your thoughts on this. Do you think the trans community has "gone too far"? Or do you think this is an exaggeration and we just see the worst and most extreme outliers? Do you think people should be required to actually think of you as a woman (to the degree that you can police someone's thoughts)? I won't demand you defend trans women in women's sports or prisons, though I am kind of interested in that, but that's a very familiar discussion we've had before (albeit rarely with trans people actually participating).

not many people just independently "discover" us

I've hung around the Slate Star Codex space for a while, if it helps. I lurked in /r/TheMotte for a while, but that's been dead for a while.

and announcing yourself with a username guaranteed to set off a lot of folks here is a little suspicious

I figured if I was going to poke the bear, I might as well be open about my identity; I've got skin in the game.

I hope you are prepared for that and have a thick skin

It is indeed a thick skin. I'll admit I'm mostly disappointed with the response; I was hoping for more light and less heat. Your response is a lot more interesting than most :)

most people don't really believe you're a woman

I think a lot of people are more open-minded than you think. I think the vast majority of people I interact with either genuinely think I'm a cis-woman, or don't care. I've encountered people that DO care, and they tend to react much differently. Obviously there are many areas of the world where that would be different, but I've done a fair bit of business travel and I feel confident in saying most people just don't notice.

and you shouldn't expect them to feel obligated to update their mental model on demand, nor should you try to sniff out signs of heresy

At the end of the day, if you're trying to treat me with respect, I think that's what really matters. When I first changed, it was clear some people struggled to update my pronouns even though they clearly respected me. I'd have been offended if anyone tried to sic HR on them.

Then came trans women who used to be mediocre middle aged male athletes suddenly joining a woman's sports league and crushing lifetime competitors.

Oh boy, that's a complex one...

First off, I don't think anyone is going to transition just to cheat at sports - you're making life long changes to your body, and also we have tons of known cheaters who chose much easier routes.

Second, the evidence I've personally seen (and I'm hardly an expert), suggests that when people do this, they're usually placing middle of the pack, which suggests that transition and hormones and all of that really does have a negative impact on performance.

Conditional on "this person has completed hormonal transition, and performs in the cis-female athletic range", I don't see a strong argument for excluding them from the league - they're going to get trounced in the male league, and aren't exactly setting records in the women's league, so... that seems like a fair competition?

Look at the other direction of transition: If someone is taking testosterone, and performs in the male athletic range, do you really want to keep them in the women's league just because they were born with a uterus?

But to bite the bullet, yeah, IF trans women DO have a clear advantage over cis women, then that defeats the whole point of gendered sports leagues. I just don't think this is nearly as decisively established

(and it does follow that any law made before we've actually established the science is probably premature, although I also can't think of a better way to collect data - run this experiment for a few years and if trans people keep ending up at the top, we made a mistake. If trans people generally end up in the middle, well, what's the problem?)

Trans women who really want to show off their erections in women's locker rooms

I think the USA has a really weird culture around nudity. There's plenty of cultures where seeing grandma and grandpa naked at the hot springs is just a normal part of life, and everyone grows up well adjusted. Seeing a penis in the locker room shouldn't be so traumatic. But then US culture acts like any nudity OUTSIDE of a locker room is horrific, which just doesn't make sense to me. If you think seeing genitalia is so bad, we should clearly have single-person gender-neutral locker rooms.

You've got a row of men showing off their penises at the urinal in the men's room. If seeing a penis is so horrible, why are you so comfortable making people endure that?

And, I mean, do you really feel more comfortable in a bathroom full of bearded trans guys? What if they've had surgery and have penises?

But the whole problem is because the US can't decide whether nudity is a normal part of life or some horrifying thing. If nudity is a normal part of life, then seeing a penis in the locker room is nothing. If nudity is some horrifying thing, then get rid of communal locker rooms and urinals and all these other disgusting locations where guys feel free to show off their dick.

I simply don't get the idea that women are UNIQUELY scandalized by penises, but guys should all be totally okay with it.

(and as a trans person, the answer is "I change in a bathroom stall because no matter which choice I make, people seeing me naked are going to get upset", which sucks)

dress like minimal-effort clowns while representing the US government.

Aww c'mon, that's heat, not light.

Trans women who want you to be fired if you won't put pronouns in your email signature.

Amusingly, pronouns in email is actually something a lot of trans people hate too. Making it mandatory means everyone in the closet has to actively submit the wrong pronouns, and it's usually done in a way that just calls attention to the most androgynous / badly-passing trans people in the group.

compete against women in the Olympics

So, going the other way: I think one could reasonably say a lot of anti-trans voices are also acting in bad faith. For instance, JK Rowling recently called out an Argentinian boxer as "trans" with... basically zero evidence? And on the "not actually trans" evidence, we've got the fact that she's from a country where transition is illegal, we've got childhood pictures of her, we've got the IOC tests that every other athlete does, and we've got said boxer suing JK Rowling (not exactly a clever move if it really is all a fraud!)

Do you have ANY examples of an openly trans person winning the gold metal in a Women's Olympic event?

should be able to show off their female penis in front of teenage girls

I'm still not sure why penises are uniquely traumatizing to teenage girls, but have no harmful effect on teenage boys. I'm still not sure why only penises have this uniquely traumatizing effect, but men can handle vaginas just fine. Again, there's plenty of cultures where nudity is common, and everyone seems to do just fine seeing a penis there. But if you think seeing a penis is this horrifying traumatizing event, why do you keep inflicting it on little boys?

And I would treat you as a very dangerous person to interact with, socially and professionally, on the assumption that a slip on my part would result in you trying to bring down sanctions upon me.

I think this really depends on where we are in the world. There's plenty of countries that make my existence illegal, so I think overall trans people are in a lot more danger than you are. If you meet me on my home turf, I've probably got some ability to make things awkward for you, but I really doubt I could get you fired or cancelled or anything.

need to be housed in women's prisons

"Rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization in the previous 6 months were highest for female inmates (212 per 1,000), more than four times higher than male rates (43 per 1,000)." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438589/

If someone wants to be put in with the more dangerous group, I'm not really clear what the controversy is?

There's clearly a huge sexual violence problem to solve here. I'd think solving that would take priority, and then in a few decades we can discuss the 1% of the population that's trans?

Similar to bathrooms, either nudity is a normal and OK part of life and you need to stop being scared of penises, or else you need to stop forcing people to get naked together.

Do you think people should be required to actually think of you as a woman (to the degree that you can police someone's thoughts)?

I'm pretty firmly anti-thought-police and anti-censorship.

That said, I'd again assert that most people that meet me don't give it that much thought, and really do just think of me as a woman.

Thanks, it was nice getting a juicy reply that was more than just "no, you're not a woman" :)

Thank you for the response. Apologies if I don't cover every response (a lengthy quote-and-respond chain can get very lengthy), but let me address a few points where I think we either disagree or you misunderstood my objections.

I think a lot of people are more open-minded than you think.

I will take your word and your lived experience for it on this, but my own impression is that (a) most trans women think they pass much better than they do (because most people are polite and aren't going to go out of their way to tell you they know you're trans), and (b) most people are open minded, but you probably think "Accepts my identification and agrees with me when I talk about trans rights means they really think I'm a woman." You might be disappointed if you knew what everyone really thinks. I don't really know, any more than you do, how many people who say TWAW really, truly believe it - neither of us can read minds or hearts. But my own suspicion is that it's less than would admit it.

About trans women athletes: I haven't studied the issue enough to produce statistics, and trans women are sufficiently rare that there probably aren't conclusive statistics yet. We all know the high profile cases like Rachel McKinnon and Lia Thomas and Laurel Hubbard, et al - the cases of mediocre male athletes who suddenly blow away their competition after transitioning are pretty numerous at this point. The response from trans rights activists is always similar to yours: "Trans women don't win every competition they enter!" And what seems to me like a lot of handwaving to deny that having a male-sized, male-muscled body with testosterone (even if reduced post-transition) is a major advantage in pretty much every athletic competition. I mean, if 10 years from now we have solid evidence that trans women do not, on average, perform at a higher level than women of similar age and experience, that would be interesting, but I have to say from the small sample sizes we can see now, I am very skeptical. Certainly every time I see a trans woman standing next to women in a rugby or a boxing match, I cannot understand how anyone can claim there isn't an obvious problem there.

Look at the other direction of transition: If someone is taking testosterone, and performs in the male athletic range, do you really want to keep them in the women's league just because they were born with a uterus?

I think as a matter of legality, it would have all go the same way, one way or the other: either trans women compete with women and trans men compete with men, or everyone competes with their birth/biological sex.

I am not aware of any trans men who after taking testosterone have become competitive in a men's sport. Are you?

The fact that (a) we don't see a lot of trans men trying to join men's teams and it hasn't been an issue because (b) any trans men in a men's league would be crushed and everyone knows it, is evidence of my point, that biologically, you are still going to compete with the body you were (mostly) born with.

About locker rooms: look, I agree that in theory, if we had a more open culture around nudity, maybe this would be less of an issue, but my problem is not that I think teenage girls will be traumatized by seeing a penis. (Nowadays, they've probably seen one about five minutes after they first got a smartphone.) My problem is explicitly the bad actors who want to show their penis to women in a locker room, knowing that it will make women uncomfortable. They are, to put it bluntly, exhibitionists if not worse, and saying "Well, if we were all just more comfortable about nudity" is missing the point. Again, I know these trans women are a minority, but I have read enough stories to know they aren't singular incidents either; there is a very small but very aggressive minority of trans women who really seem to get their jollies by making women (and girls) feel uncomfortable in female spaces. Whether it's because they think this is some sort of sitting-at-the-lunch-counter stand for trans civil rights, or just garden variety harassment and exhibitionism, it is definitely doing nothing to convince me they are acting in good faith. And I can't say I am impressed by an argument like this:

You've got a row of men showing off their penises at the urinal in the men's room. If seeing a penis is so horrible, why are you so comfortable making people endure that?

Dude (I say with tongue somewhat in cheek), as a penis-haver (past and/or present), you know damn well that we don't "show off our penises" at the urinals. You have to kind of go out of your way to see another guy's junk in the bathroom, unless he's waving it around.

Which is also unfortunately the pattern I have heard from these penis-in-the-women's-locker-room stories. Men and women will both walk around naked in the locker room, but generally speaking, they don't like... display themselves, or go so far as to stand in front of another person giving them a belligerent full-frontal display. How often have you seen that, honestly? If someone walked up to you buck naked in the locker room and just stood there trying to engage you in conversation from an arm's length away while letting it all hang out and no effort to cover anything up, would you not consider that... strange? Especially if they are a stranger? Come on now.

I simply don't get the idea that women are UNIQUELY scandalized by penises, but guys should all be totally okay with it.

I mean, leaving aside the whole sexual assault survivor thing (some women probably genuinely are freaked out by seeing a penis in what is supposed to be a woman's space), I can say I was at a convention recently that decided (because everyone there is super-woke) that all the bathrooms would be "agender." Most people, of course, still used the "men's" and "women's" rooms as appropriate for their equipment, but while I was standing at the urinal, one woman (who I happen to know is one of those super-woke people and probably calls herself non-binary or something) walked out of a stall and past me. And you know what? I felt uncomfortable. Not threatened or anything, just -- neither of the bathrooms were crowded, so she decided to use the men's room to make a point. And it annoyed me.

Aww c'mon, that's heat, not light.

Well... I will cop to being a little snarky there, but honestly, Admiral Rachel Levine really does strike me as someone who is cosplaying a fetish. Maybe she really, truly does identify as a woman and has always felt female, but I am pretty skeptical, because her entire presentation is that of a man who knows she looks like a man and wants everyone to know it and dares you to say something about it.

As for Rowling and Imane Khalifa, I honestly don't know enough about Khalifa's status to pass judgment. To my knowledge, Rowling didn't say she was trans, she said she was a man. Which may or may not be true, either biologically or legally. I have defended Rowling in the past because I think a lot of the attacks on her are made in bad faith, but I think Khalifa's case is, at the very least, complicated and she probably spent the first part of her life believing she's a girl, which makes me less hasty to call her a man myself and I wish Rowling had reserved judgment as well. But I'm not a famous billionaire who's made this my personal cause (nor been subjected to attacks over it for years). I think someone who is (most likely) an intersex person with chromosomal abnormalities who grew up as a girl is a pretty edge case and a distraction from central trans issues.

I think this really depends on where we are in the world. There's plenty of countries that make my existence illegal, so I think overall trans people are in a lot more danger than you are. If you meet me on my home turf, I've probably got some ability to make things awkward for you, but I really doubt I could get you fired or cancelled or anything.

I live in the US so that's where I am talking about, not someplace where you could be killed for being trans or gay. I can't say I find it reassuring that you basically say "Well, I probably couldn't actually threaten you" but it seems like you would if you could.

"Rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization in the previous 6 months were highest for female inmates (212 per 1,000), more than four times higher than male rates (43 per 1,000)." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2438589/

If someone wants to be put in with the more dangerous group, I'm not really clear what the controversy is?

Okay, I skimmed this paper - can't say I read it in detail, but it sure doesn't make it easy to separate out sexual victimization by staff compared to sexual vicitimization by other inmates. Let's say that women do prey on other women in prison at a higher rate than men prey on other men. I can think of a number of explanations besides "Actually, women are the more dangerous group," but it definitely doesn't suggest that a trans woman being put in a woman's prison is in more danger from the other female inmates than she is to them. Especially if said trans woman used to be a violent rapist and has undergone no physical transition. Yeah, I saw that Orange is the New Black episode where Laverne Cox gets jumped by a bunch of other women. Let's say I was not persuaded of its verisimilitude.

it seems like you would if you could.

Forgive me for only skimming this discussion, but is there some other comment that gave you this impression? I don't get it from what you quoted.

It's hard to talk about threat in the capabilities sense without any subtext of threat in the intentions sense, but I don't perceive any deliberate subtext.

On trans athletes: honestly, I think we largely agree here. I think a few high profile cases don't provide as much evidence about the average result, but I'm certainly open to the idea that it's unfair.

I can't say I find it reassuring that you basically say "Well, I probably couldn't actually threaten you" but it seems like you would if you could.

I'm not sure what about this reply made you think I would want to get you fired/cancelled. Could you elaborate? I already said I was against siccing HR on people who used the wrong pronouns for me at work, so that seems like a pretty big disconnect

My problem is explicitly the bad actors who want to show their penis to women in a locker room

Presumably we should treat that person like a criminal? Sure, it's a hard problem, but so are the bad actors who want to show their penis to little boys. We still let gay people use the bathroom, though.

If someone walked up to you buck naked in the locker room and just stood there trying to engage you in conversation from an arm's length away while letting it all hang out and no effort to cover anything up, would you not consider that... strange?

Oh, I found that super weird when I was growing up. Quite a few guys discovered I was not comfortable with that, and would go out of their way to make me uncomfortable. But no one seems to want to do anything about that. So... again, why is it okay to expect little boys to handle this, but grown women can't?

Dude (I say with tongue somewhat in cheek), as a penis-haver (past and/or present), you know damn well that we don't "show off our penises" at the urinals. You have to kind of go out of your way to see another guy's junk in the bathroom, unless he's waving it around.

It really depends - those big trough-style urinals at stadiums don't leave much to the imagination. Certainly, I've seen penises while using the bathroom numerous times, while I have seen a stranger's vulva exactly zero times. And your whole concern was exactly the sort of guy who is "waving it around."

I felt uncomfortable. Not threatened or anything, just -- neither of the bathrooms were crowded, so she decided to use the men's room to make a point. And it annoyed me.

... okay? What's your point? People feel uncomfortable when I use the men's room, for exactly that reason. If my trans-masc friends show up in the women's room, it makes people SUPER uncomfortable. If it makes you uncomfortable, why do you want more of it?

Especially if said trans woman used to be a violent rapist

I mean, presumably we have methods for handling violent rapists in prison? I'm sure there's at least one lesbian violent rapist out there.

The prison thing has a lot to unpack. If you can show some strong evidence that trans women are reasonably safe in male prison AND are a threat to cis women in female prison, I'll have to seriously reconsider my world view. So far I've not seen much evidence of either.

and has undergone no physical transition

See, the goalposts for everyone else is "uterus". If we change the standard to "vaginoplasty" I definitely feel better. The idea of throwing someone into male prison, despite them having a vagina and breasts, just seems insane on the surface.

If you're willing to bite the bullet and say "anyone with a vagina is female"... I mean, I could still quibble and debate, but I'd honestly consider you more of an ally than an enemy in today's political climate.

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You've got a row of men showing off their penises at the urinal in the men's room. If seeing a penis is so horrible, why are you so comfortable making people endure that?

Amadan touched on this, but I feel it's worth joining in: men very much do not show off their penises in the men's room. The norm is to give other men as much space as you can (leaving at least a urinal between you, especially in the case of urinals without privacy barriers), and to politely refrain from looking at other guys' penises even if one might catch a glimpse. In fact, someone who is showing off his penis (or deliberately looking at someone else's penis) is considered extremely rude and subject to social consequences for it. I'm not sure if you meant this claim literally or just as a rhetorical flourish, but either way reality is the exact opposite of what you describe.

We're talking about, like, 100 out of 300,000 trans women misbehaving. Do you really think there are not 100 men in the UK that have waved their penis around and tried to make people uncomfortable? Or are just socially oblivious and therefore always take the closest urinal instead of spacing out?

My personal experience with locker rooms is that if you take 100 guys, there'll be at least one that Really Clearly Does Not Mind Showing Off. Maybe they're not actively strutting around with an erection, but they're making zero effort to hide it, they're taking their sweet time changing, and they're more than happy to walk over for a conversation with it danging right there. Congratulations on you not personally being a victim of all that, but as a victim... I find it really weird that everyone here just wants to ignore that and reassure me that no, unlike my experience, everyone ELSE gets taken seriously an there's consequences when it happens to THEM.

But also, if the standard is purely "subjected to social consequences", then... what's the problem? It still feels insulting to me to say that cis women are utterly incompetent and can't even handle a simple disruption like this, but somehow it's absolutely zero problem for men to handle it. In what other areas are women too psychologically frail to handle things that don't affect men? If women can't even handle one person behaving inappropriately in the bathroom, why in the world are we trusting them to be police officers and politicians?

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I'm still not sure why penises are uniquely traumatizing to teenage girls, but have no harmful effect on teenage boys. I'm still not sure why only penises have this uniquely traumatizing effect, but men can handle vaginas just fine. Again, there's plenty of cultures where nudity is common, and everyone seems to do just fine seeing a penis there. But if you think seeing a penis is this horrifying traumatizing event, why do you keep inflicting it on little boys?

I don't think the concern is trauma. Exposing a male sex organ to a girl/woman is seen as defiling her due to women being traditionally considered sexually "pure". There's no need to worry about defiling boys as they are inherently defiled.

You would be wrong that there is no concern of trauma. Being exposed to sexual stuff in spaces that are supposed to be safe tends to be disturbing for a lot of women/girls because they have to deal with a lot of unwanted sexual attention/harassment in general.

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With regards to sports, I don't think anyone disputes that estrogen has a negative effect on athleticism and testosterone a positive. The dispute is over the "performs in the cis-female athletic range" part. I would probably put trans women and men in the men's category, in that testosterone is probably not going to give enough advantage to a trans man to really matter.

As for seeing penises, I guess it's one of those things where you probably just have to say America is prudish and you are an exception. Short of Amazon tribes, even less prudish places like Japan that have penis festivals have segregated restrooms.

I'm waiting for a non-self-referential definition of gender

External Gender: People perceived as "female" get treated differently

Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female".

This is self-referential. "The meaning of female gender is treating a person like a female, and a person who is of female gender is one who wants to be treated like a female."

So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?

To me, I'm looking out at the world and seeing "Objectively, society classifies people into two clusters, which it calls male and female."

For historical reasons, these clusters tend to correlate with biological sex, but are clearly independent of it - even cis people get misgendered. I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex? In the classic case, gender seems to be something like "best guess as to your genitalia", but people can still guess wrong. In trans-positive spaces it's more like "my best guess which pronouns would make you comfortable", which removes the legacy connection to genitalia entirely

So are you saying all subjective categories are self-referential? "Republicans are people who vote for other Republicans" and such?

That is a volitional category, not a subjective category. With volitional categories you can give the appearance of circularity with statements like "Christians are those who believe in Christianity" or "Military families are families where a father/mother has enlisted in the military." This superficial circularity is resolved by defining the second term. "Christians are those who believe Jesus of Nazarath (0-33 AD) was the son of God and his teachings result in eternal life for those who follow them." "Military families are families where a father/mother receives a salary from the government to train in the use of weapons and fight in the event of war."

This cannot be done with "A female is someone who wants to be treated as a female". Even if female is understood to be volitional, the second term goes undefined.

I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex?

With the exception of grammar? No. If gender is not sex, it is incumbent on gender theorists to provide a non-circular definition.

"External gender" is your term for "gender roles", which can be defined as the manners and expectations society has for the male/female biological sex. If you want to say "gender roles should be abolished", you have a coherent position. But trans advocates do not (usually) want this; they want the gender roles to remain even as they deny female/male (the real, definable concepts) as meaningful categories.

"gender roles", which can be defined as the manners and expectations society has for the male/female biological sex.

Then why do people keep expecting me to act like a woman? I didn't grow a uterus, but everyone is calling me "ma'am" and they get upset if I go topless and show off my breasts.

It seems pretty clear to me that "gender roles" aren't based on my biological sex at all, but my gender presentation.

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For historical reasons, these clusters tend to correlate with biological sex, but are clearly independent of it - even cis people get misgendered. I think we can both agree that gender does exist as something independent of sex? In the classic case, gender seems to be something like "best guess as to your genitalia", but people can still guess wrong. In trans-positive spaces it's more like "my best guess which pronouns would make you comfortable", which removes the legacy connection to genitalia entirely

This all sounds perfectly sensible - until you apply it to literally any other trait based on a biological substrate, at which point the reasoning collapses and the motivated reasoning is exposed.

One of the things people most frequently say about my physical appearance is that I look much younger than I am: people from all walks of life consistently place me at about four-five years younger than I actually am (and I've gone to no especial lengths to bring about this state of affairs other than regular exercise and moisturising my face when I remember to). Does it therefore follow that I have an "age identity" which is wholly distinct from my physical age? In the classic case, "age identity" seems to be something like "my best guess as to how much time has passed since you were born", but perhaps in trans-age-positive spaces "age identity" is more like "my best guess as to which age you would feel most comfortable if people thought you were that age". Which implies that Madonna's "biological age" is 66, but her "age identity" is 21. Perhaps it would be trans-age-phobic of me to remind her of her biological age (like sending her out an automated email urging her to get checked for breast cancer, as her age puts her at high risk for that condition), rather than "affirming" her age identity at every turn.

You don't have to be Rachel Dolezal to be mistaken for someone of a different ethnic group. I've had people start talking to me in Finnish unprompted, even though I'm not Finnish, have no Finnish ancestry and have never even set foot in Finland. I have Mexican friends who get driven up the wall by people thinking they're Brazilian. Does it therefore follow that everyone has an "ethnic identity" wholly distinct from their actual ethnic background?

Sometimes you think someone's skinny, then you weigh them and it turns out they're heavier than they look. Does it therefore imply that...

Rather than having to invent this whole elaborate set of epicycles around gender as a trait wholly distinct from sex, I would propose what I feel is a more elegant solution. "Humans are constantly observing and categorising other humans. Over time, they build up expectations of what a typical member of a given exclusive category looks like (or acts like, or sounds like etc.). Because everyone's training data is different, no one's training data is perfect, and there is huge variability in what the members of a sufficiently large category will look, act or sound like - inevitably some amount of humans will miscategorise Person X as a member of category A when they are in fact a member of category B. It does not therefore follow that Person X really is a member of category A in some kind of mysterious ineffable spiritual sense which transcends mere biology. The above is true of any category with a sufficiently large number of members - for any given sex, ethnic group, sexuality, age, height, mass, disability status, annual income, profession, dietary restrictions, level of educational attainment, criminal record etc. there will always be some amount of people who get categorised into the wrong category by one or more people. This is a normal human error, and the appropriate response is a simple 'oh sorry, my bad': we are not required to invent elaborate ancillary concepts and entire academic disciplines to explain and elaborate upon this discrepancy between individual expectation and observable reality."

People routinely get surgeries to try and look younger. There's a rather huge industry around catering to people's "age identity" and trying to "pass" as a younger age than they really are. It is in fact considered rude to go around pointing out that people are older than they look.

No one is going around calling women in heels "deceptive" even if it does make them seem taller.

Given all that, why should I feel bad about taking advantage of your classification errors to get myself called "ma'am"?

like sending her out an automated email urging her to get checked for breast cancer

I really don't get how this analogy is anti-trans. Presumably if someone has transitioned and grown breasts, we should acknowledge that reality and send them emails suggesting they get checked for breast cancer now that they're at risk? And equally, I don't think a trans guy who has had a double mastectomy is at huge risk, here.

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Sex: the biological reality. A messy mix of chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy.

I don't really think this definition is accurate. The only definition of "sex" which really makes sense is "do your reproductive organs produce small or large gametes?" (substitute "or did they ever" for menopausal women, women who've had their tubes tied, or men who became sterile after undergoing chemotherapy; add in "before you removed them" for men who've been castrated, or women who've undergone oophorectomies; substitute "or will they" for prepubescent children; substitute "were it not for some kind of birth defect, would your reproductive organs produce small or large gametes" for the congenitally sterile). This satisfactorily answers the question "what is your sex?" in 99% of cases. Bringing in secondary sexual characteristics adds nothing to the conversation and does nothing to demonstrate that (as so many trans activists have claimed) sex is a "spectrum": a male with functioning testicles but who incidentally happens to have breasts becomes no less male as a result; a woman with narrow hips and small breasts is not "less female" than a woman with wide hips and large breasts. Yes there are intersex people, but no one thinks that the existence of people born with one leg (or, more rarely, three legs) invalidates the definition of "human" as a bipedal species. And even as far as "intersex" goes, it doesn't complicate our understanding of sexual dimorphism as much as trans activists would like us to believe: if there has been an intersex person with functioning testicles who has also been impregnated, I would love to read about it.

Why does it make sense to include menopausal women, people with birth defects, etc. in that category? "People who menstruate and can be impgregnated" seems like a perfectly natural category, but you're adding all sorts of exceptions in. If we're going to add a whole bunch of exceptions, why not also "Trans Women who have undergone SRS"? If we can create an artificial uterus in the future, does that make transition valid?

Why does it make sense to include menopausal women, people with birth defects, etc. in that category? If we're going to add a whole bunch of exceptions, why not also "Trans Women who have undergone SRS"?

Menopausal women's bodies once produced large gametes, but no longer do. That is a historical fact about their bodies. Just because someone has one of their legs amputated doesn't change the historical fact that they were bipedal from birth. Just as we consider prepubescent girls females because in most cases their bodies eventually will be capable of producing large gametes, we consider menopausal women female because their bodies once did produce large gametes: the arrow of time points both forwards and backwards.

Women with birth defects rendering them infertile have all the relevant "equipment" associated with the production of large gametes, but something went wrong in the development process and they're essentially being included as honorary members in the set, as they possess every characteristic associated with the set except for one specific thing that went wrong. (Another way of looking at it is that "X, which is broken or defective" is generally considered a subset of "X". If someone owns a car, but the engine isn't running and it's sitting on blocks, they still own a car: the owner still belongs to category "people who own at least one car". Barren women may not produce large gametes, but they still belong to the set of "people with ovaries". Trans women neither produce large gametes nor possess even defective examples of the organs which produce large gametes.)

By contrast, essentially all trans women's bodies had all of the characteristics associated with the male sex since puberty, including the key rule-in criterion (the ability to produce small gametes). SRS does nothing to change this: from the perspective of "what sex are you?", all it does is remove the ability to produce small gametes without doing anything to aid the target body in producing large gametes. Trans women who undergo SRS have not really "transitioned" from the male sex to the female sex: from the strict definition of sex outlined above, all they've done is desex (or emasculate) themselves and gone to greater or lesser lengths to approximate some of the secondary sexual characteristics associated with female people. SRS doesn't involve implanting ovaries or a womb (even defective ovaries or wombs) into the recipient's body. A male body which cannot reproduce is not functionally equivalent to a fertile (or even infertile) female body.

A memorable and evocative analogy I once encountered is that motorcyclists wear helmets that cover their entire head and leather clothes in case they have a bad fall, while cyclists wear lighter clothes for aerodynamicity and smaller helmets. But it's the vehicle you're riding (literally, what's in between your legs) which determines whether you're a motorcyclist or a cyclist, not the ancillary clothing choices incidentally associated with it: a cyclist wearing leather clothes and a helmet that covers his entire head is not "on the motorcycle spectrum" or someone who has successfully "transitioned" from cyclist to motorcyclist. All that FtM medical transition does is add the leather and removes the bicycle without replacing the bicycle with a motorcycle.

If we can create an artificial uterus in the future, does that make transition valid?

Maybe, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Seems like a real armchair hypothetical given the current (decidedly primitive) state of the art in gender reassignment surgical procedures.

Sure, but what does ‘female’ and ‘male’ mean?

Ultimately, it comes down to biological sex. The actual definition of a trans woman is ‘a biological male by sex who performs a social role or set of roles associated with women’. The question thereof comes down to ‘why should we care’. Like the social roles associated with women that aren’t on some level arbitrary are the ones a male-sexed person can’t perform anyways.

Like the social roles associated with women that aren’t on some level arbitrary are the ones a male-sexed person can’t perform anyways.

It's worth noting that there isn't broad agreement about what these differences in gender roles are. As far as I can tell, the entire war between trans activists and radical feminists happened because a specific sect of feminism denies that there is (or ought to be, at least) a difference between those gender roles. If women can be, say, firemenfighters, there isn't a distinct "men" gender role to mismatch with your mechanical parts, and so from their perspective the entire idea is nonsensical.

I've always found it odd that radical feminists hold some of the strongest objections to men who voluntarily emasculate and feminise themselves while it reads as a rad fem fantasy.

If the choice were between encouraging men to emasculate themselves at the cost of sharing the label of "woman" with them versus the essentialist position of telling men that they'll never be women so stop trying I would have assumed they'd choose the former.

I don't always find myself agreeing with the most radical egalitarian types, but I can at least accept their viewpoints. We've largely broadened the definition of "woman" to include anything a man can do (specific corner cases, maybe not). But they weren't really successful, as far as I can tell, at broadening the definition of "men". We haven't really increased the acceptance of men in caregiving roles, or even wearing traditionally women's attire -- the reverse pant suit, as it were.

I'm not planning to do it myself, but "I'm not a trans woman, I'm a man wearing a perfectly egalitarian dress. Don't assume my gender. " would at least be an interesting wrench to throw into the debate.

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In my experience, TERFs tend to be a lot more chill with trans women who've undergone bottom surgery than with those who haven't. They tend to find males with fully intact male genitalia but who still want to be considered "women" much more aggravating/threatening than males without, for understandable reasons.

Sure, but what does ‘female’ and ‘male’ mean?

They're clusters that were originally based around sex, yes, but plenty of cultures use the categories without referring back to sex these days. It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.

The actual definition of a trans woman

I mean, every word has multiple definitions, especially a controversial phrase like that. But also: that wasn't the question that was being asked.

It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.

This seems like a fundamentally flawed analogy. The choice of the year 1 as the starting point of the Gregorian calendar was arbitrary, meaningless and didn't refer to any actual historical event (even most historians no longer believe Jesus Christ was born in that specific year), but changing calendars is an enormous hassle, so we're stuck with this one even if it's based on something which is ultimately arbitrary and irrelevant. With you so far.

But the "clusters" that are based around the words "male" and "female" are not meaningless and arbitrary. In fact, the concepts associated with these words have more predictive power than almost anything in the biological (never mind social) sciences. For instance: 100% of human babies born via natural birth or C-section were gestated in the womb of a person whose body produced large gametes i.e. a female person. Conversely, 100% of the human people who impregnated another human person were people whose bodies produced small gametes i.e. male people.

Of course there's loads of ancillary, arbitrary and irrelevant nonsense associated with these two categories of human being (there's no reason that people whose bodies produce small gametes shouldn't wear pink clothes or dresses). But pointing out that there's loads of ancillary irrelevant nonsense associated with a given category of entity doesn't mean that the category itself is meaningless, or that the category doesn't "cleave reality at the joints" in a manner demonstrative of underlying physical laws. Boats still float on the water even if they are given a male name and no one gets around to smashing a bottle of champagne against the hull. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

If you're measuring by gametes, then post-menopausal women are a third gender, and the same gender as a eunuch. Does that really seem like it cleaves reality at the joints?

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They're clusters that were originally based around sex, yes, but plenty of cultures use the categories without referring back to sex these days. It's like how "2024 AD" means "two thousand and twenty four years after Jesus died"; you're making a fairly simple error if you think our calendar system relies on the existence of an actual biological Jesus.

Those cultures are wrong. Not in the way that using AUC dating instead of AD dating would be on a sufficiently different page that answering '2777' to 'what year is it' would functionally be wrong, but wrong in the sense that it doesn't actually tell us anything. Pink skirts being associated with femininity doesn't have a particular reason behind it; skirts being associated with masculinity still exists in certain contexts, such as kilts or fustanella(this garment is even frilly). Pink is for girls and blue is for boys was the other way around in (barely)living memory, and in fact I can readily imagine a counterfactual world where girls wear blue because Virgin Mary and boys wear pink because that's what blood looks like on a white shirt. On the other hand, uteruses being feminine is obviously biological. Most historical cultures defined, and most cultures today define, femininity as uterus having, and the claim of transwomen is that in every way except having a uterus they are more like having one than not. This is functionally self-defeating for any claim to separate the biological fact of sex from the cluster 'women'.

Yeah. Just since the points of measure are arbitrary it's still an absolute distance that is being communicated whether you do so in Meters or Feet.

If you remove the uterus, does someone stop being a woman? Are you really excluding anyone who, via birth defect, didn't develop a uterus? If we figure out how to grow artificial organs, does that mean trans people become acceptable?

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Welcome to themotte!

People who think gender is defined circularly have a certain intuition about words - namely, that words don't really mean anything. These are usually highly systematizing people who would feel at home in a math textbook. In math, there is no particular reason why the particular words are used. Math could be done with random words as long as the relationship between the words is the same relationship as in our real math. This kind of person is over-represented in this forum many times more than in real life because of this forum's genetic history. Go back 15 years and some of the people on this website were reading a systematizer systematizing things

The reason why they would say these definitions are circular is because these definitions revolve around the use of the literal word "ma'am." If we played the randomize-the-word-keep-the-relationship, it starts to look kind of empty to say something like

A fnord is someone who wants to be called "ma'am"

So what is the meaning of the word "ma'am?"

In any case, I'm not sure "circular definitions" are the true objection to following trans-activist policy and culture proposals. You have a reasonable desire, which is for people to treat you a certain way. I think "transphobia" really is the best word for the reason why people don't treat a trans person like they desire.

Likewise, widespread shortphobia among straight women is the reason why society doesn't treat short kings like people.

A circular definition is just not useful. It breaks down and is only tethered to reality by the lingering remembrance of a rooted definition. A tether that will only fray and disintegrate over time like a plant pulled from it's soil.

There are ways to define trans that aren't circular, they just would cleave off one or another group of the trans coalition or make some asks carry less weight. My current model of trans(I'm going to give the MTF case but assume a symmetrical FTM case) is that it is a feature of some male brains that they are able to be in a state where they genuinely believe that would be happiest if they had as close as possible the experience of being female. This belief can be true or untrue, suppressible or unsuppressible those are their own questions. This belief is genuine and following the principles of freedom of form these people should be allowed to pursue body modifications and ask those around them to treat them as if they were female in whatever ways are reasonable to accommodate. Polite people should humor them and there should be a general understanding that this is an acceptable way to live. However we should not blind ourselves to the reality that this is fundamentally a truth about male brains, that there exist no gendered souls and that a brain cannot be in the wrong body.

I think this is basically the truth of the matter combined with the most reasonable course of action to take in response to it. A circular definition doesn't let us solve anything, it says nothing about the state of the world and is evidence of poor reasoning.

People who think gender is defined circularly have a certain intuition about words - namely, that words don't really mean anything. These are usually highly systematizing people who would feel at home in a math textbook.

I've noticed people do not at all share my intuitions about these terms, so I'm curious to explore this a bit more:

a non-self-referential definition of gender that doesn't just mean 'sex'

Gender is which pronouns I prefer, the same way my name is an identifier I prefer. Does this mean "names" are also an "empty" concept?

that doesn't just mean 'sex'

So, names used to be based on profession, right? Smith, Cook, so on. Does this mean that a name "just means" profession, even though that's a historical feature, not a modern one? Are you okay with the modern tradition of divorcing names from that former meaning?

Currency used to be based on the gold standard, but now it's just a bunch of numbers on computers. Is currency still "just about" gold? Is currency now also a circular word with no real meaning? Are you okay with the modern tradition of divorcing currency from the gold standard?

For the present, English pronouns do "just mean" sex, but it doesn't have to always be that way. In the far-future, pronouns could easily be just a normal thing people choose, eventually divorced from its accidental history of indicating sex. I think most realistically, we would rid language of gendered pronouns altogether to reduce social friction. Why memorize two identifiers for everyone in your life? That someone wants to overhaul language but chooses to keep gendered pronouns around indicates to me they have an agenda.

I have no problem, personally, with language moving that direction. Personally I try to use any trans person's preferred pronouns (for fear of social censure). I have no problem, personally, with decoupling all connotations and emotions from "she" and "woman." Because most of my social circle is progressive, I already do that in my head.

In 2100, Rule 30 of the internet will apply to real-life and also be amended -- that all women are trans women unless she proves it. I nominate the rule text "women are trans women."

they have an agenda

You say that like it's a weird, nefarious thing, but it seems like everyone who wants to change anything is obviously going to have an agenda?

I'm certainly not adverse to "abolish gender entirely" but it seems a lot easier to slot trans women into the existing system -vs- getting rid of the whole thing.

Are you arguing that common definitions of gender (e.g. "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman") aren't circular? Or are you being sarcastic and I'm too drunk to pick up on it?

I was explaining arguments without endorsing them because my personal opinion isn't that important.

"a woman is anyone who identifies as 'woman'" isn't circular exactly, but it is empty and silly. To engage in malicious compliance, you should just agree that a woman is someone who identifies as 'woman' but then play stupid whenever anyone ever says anything interesting about a woman. If playing semantic games with "woman" is beneath you, then I'm not sure why you'd care if [silly progressive definition] is circular or not -- it would be silly to you either way.

There is a coherent definition hidden inside the woke agenda: A woman is anyone who wants to be treated like a ciswoman adult human female. This is obviously the correct description for the category that progressives call "woman." Naturally, they are allergic to saying the quiet part out loud.

Edit: (Unsurprisingly, the natural definition reveals that ciswomen is a more fundamental category than woman. Ciswoman is like "red" or "purple" -- you just vaguely gesture at examples from the senses -- you know obviously what I'm talking about)

words don't really mean anything.

We can obviously agree, empirically, that there are two major clusters in how people get treated, male and female. "Ma'am" refers to one of those two clusters. The "ma'am" cluster includes both people with penises, and people with vaginas. This all seems like a basic objective observation of reality to me.

Given that, I don't get how this is any more circular than any other subjective category, like "nerd" or "tall" or "centrist"?

We can obviously agree, empirically, that there are two major clusters in how people get treated, male and female. "Ma'am" refers to one of those two clusters.

Yes we can.

The "ma'am" cluster includes both people with penises, and people with vaginas.

No it does not. The ma'am cluster- otherwise known as women- includes people who have vaginas, xx chromosomes, uteruses, etc. Larping males don't belong there even if it makes them sad, any more than the various schizos who run for president on the platform that they have a chip in their brain belong in the oval office.

Having male genitals or xy chromosomes is disqualifying from being a woman. There are some people who don't fit into either category, for no fault of their own, and we call them intersex.

You can say that this way of drawing the line is arbitrary, but you would simply be wrong- my way, and the old way, is better because it gets at the information people actually care about. I don't find you wearing skirts to be some fundamental aspect of your identity because you can put on a pair of pants with, presumably, the same level of effort that I can. But you can't change your biological sex. It takes major surgery to change your anatomy- and artificial vaginas are not functional in the same way as natural ones in a variety of ways. It is impossible to change your genetic makeup. Transwomen having female-typical hormones requires constant intervention.

It is possible to be wrong about your own identity, even if you disguise yourself.

No it does not. The ma'am cluster

You're really claiming that not a single trans woman has ever been referred to as "ma'am"? 😂 That's a pretty amazing claim, so I'm assuming you have some pretty amazing evidence for it?

But, you know, people have called me personally "ma'am", totally unprompted! They do it all the time, in fact. If I try to explain that I'm a guy, they get confused. So... I mean, I know for a fact you're wrong. I'm pretty sure you can find other trans people with similar experiences.

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If you mean to argue that the way people treat trans women is functionally indistinguishable from the way they treat cis women - well, no. Indeed, even trans activists don't believe this - essentially every complaint made by trans activists (including Tickle, which started this debate) seems to ultimately boil down to "I wish people treated me as a [sir/ma'am], but they don't. Even when I can see that they're trying to treat me as a [sir/ma'am], I can tell they don't really see me that way and are just playing pretend in an effort to mollify me." And that's not even getting into the people who complain that "people keep treating me as a sir, even though I would prefer to be treated as neither sir nor ma'am and this should be obvious to outside observers even though everything about my appearance and comportment is entirely consistent with my being a sir" even though our society never created a script for how to interact with people who are neither sir nor ma'am because those two categories covered 100% of people until some teenagers spent too much time having their narcissism reinforced and encouraged on Tumblr, and now here we are.

I get called "ma'am" and don't see any particular difference in how I'm treated. Plenty of trans people "pass"; it's not exactly an obscure topic. It shouldn't be surprising that trans people who fail at passing complain more - the ones who succeed are already getting treated how they want, so there's no really much to complain about personally.

The supposed circularity of woman is just whenever people use quotes to say something like identifies as "woman." You sidestep that by changing the word to "ma'am" but what if someone says, "err, but you're not a ma'am"? Then you need to define ma'am and then you might run into some circularity.

If you don't want to define ma'am then it turns out woman is just a cluster unified by an arbitrary desire to be called a certain word. Realistically, it's also an arbitrary desire to be treated a certain way in general.

With tall and nerd you don't need to make reference to "quoted" "labels" and self-ID, so you are unlikely to run into any circularity.

I will re-iterate that the supposed circularity is not really the objection to trans activist policy and culture proposals. A significant part of the population thinks the trans desire is unreasonable. The circularity of the new woman definition is a strategy to give trans people what they desire (certain social privileges and connotations).

but what if someone says, "err, but you're not a ma'am"?

That would seem like a weird thing to say, since "ma'am" is how most people refer to me, and it'll confuse other people if you refer to me as "sir".

an arbitrary desire to be called a certain word.

I mean, isn't that how names work? What's wrong with wanting to be called a certain word? I'm not forcing anyone to use it

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External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".

This is the 'gender role' terminology: The social role played by a particular gender.

Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.

And this is the 'gender identity' or 'gender performance', depending on the exact thing being discussed: Either that internal feeling of what 'gender' you are or the behaviors that feel natural to you on account of your felt 'gender'.

But here is the hard part: What is 'gender' separate from all of those individual nouns? What does the modifier 'gender' alone mean in front of all of these?

The truth is that it's an empty signifier unless you treat it as as synonym for 'sex'. But that has a whole lot of implications that aren't like by the kind of activist theorists who invented 'gender' as something different: Someone with a 'gender identity' discordant with their physical sex has a body dysmorphia, for example, and not something more deeply psychologically central. If that's true, the drive to 'affirming' care runs up on the rocks of evidence based medicine, where it's not entirely clear that that paradigm is actually the best. And it also means there are only really two genders, because sex and gender are the same thing and there are, in humans, only one big gamete and one little gamete and the machinery to produce each (which may or may not actually work in any particular implementation). That means that the 'nonbinary' clique is a philosophically incoherent trend, rather than anything more meaningful (not like there is anything wrong with that -- there's a reason punk ranges from anarcho-communist radicals to skinhead Nazis: there's something at a the heart of punk that doesn't make sense or, more likely, there's really nothing there but loud, angry music).

But these results are disturbing, so the desperate pretense must be continue.

Now that I've learned a bit about the definitions here, this actually seems even easier:

The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.

So, a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina.

Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.

I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course, but it seems pointless to discuss anything past this point without first agreeing to this point. If you reject this, then obviously you reject anything more radical, and I'm more curious where the possible middle-ground is. I don't like the modern trans "grab as much privilege as we can" attitude at all; I just want to pee in peace, and that requires at least some willingness to compromise.

(I am less familiar with trans men, I will admit. I get the impression their goalposts are more "remove boobs and grow a beard", which still doesn't refer to anything immutable or circular)

The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.

Hi! I was skipping a lot of the conversation you started, because I didn't want to contribute to the "explain yourself now, trans person" dogpile, but my ears perked up at that one.

My understanding is that this view is pretty outdated. WPATH seems to outright reject it, and to only use it cynically as a foot-in-the-door thing in countries with lower trans acceptance. They hold that it's all about "authenticity" and self-expression, and that doctor's empashis needs to be on removing barriers, and on patient autonomy. They don't even think it's about transitioning from man to woman, or the other way around, and are happily endorsing "non-binary" surgeries.

Would you say they are out of line, or is it that you're more old-school and no longer representative of the community?

I think a lot of trans women genuinely fall into the older, classic model like me. It's really hard to say if it represents the actual community, because there's some loud voices that want to make the newest ideology the only one, but I do think there's a lot of people like me, and still are, even if we're no longer the majority within the trans community. I think there's a lot more of us than you'd guess, simply because we tend to be quiet: we already got what we want, as long as we don't draw attention to ourselves.

I have a bit of trouble taking someone seriously as a "trans woman" if they just want to self-identify, don't have dysphoria, and aren't even taking HRT, but... I'm asking people who don't believe I'm a woman to call me "she/her" anyway, so I'm at least fine with names and pronouns even there.

If we accept the idea that I want to have a cis-woman looking body despite not being born with one, it doesn't really surprise me that some people might want "non-binary" mixes. I don't really understand the category well myself, though. I think a lot of non-binary is much more about abolishing gender roles entirely - most cis women I meet who identify as "non-binary" just seem unhappy with society's concept of "female", or are viewing that concept through a fairly narrow lens. All that said, if you're actually going out and getting surgery, I'm going to take you seriously.

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The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.

So, a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina.

Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.

If "trans woman" was defined as "a male person who has undergone a surgery to change their penis into a neovagina", I think that's a definition I could get on board with: it's straightforward, non-circular and trivial to verify. Perhaps we could be even a little bit more generous and define it as "a male person who has undergone a surgery to change their penis into a neovagina, or is actively seeking one (has applied to the relevant medical practitioners etc.)".

I'd just like to gently point out that such a definition excludes almost everyone who identifies as a trans woman: only 5-13% of trans women have undergone genital surgery. Even if we allow that for every trans woman who has undergone genital surgery, there's another trans woman who has applied for it but is stuck on a waiting list (or even two such women), your definition still excludes anywhere from 61% to 90% of males who consider themselves trans women.

This is not intended as a "gotcha", it's a completely sincere question (echoing @Amadan, I'm genuinely grateful to get the input of someone with "skin in the game", so to speak). You're a trans woman who has medically transitioned. Supposing you're having a conversation with a visibly male person who has told you that her name is Samantha and her preferred pronouns are she/her. During the course of the conversation, the topic of medical transition comes up, you start talking about your own experiences, and Samantha mentions that she hasn't undergone bottom surgery. She also mentions that she has no interest in undergoing it and is perfectly happy with the configuration of her genitals as they stand.

Once she's made this clear to you, do you continue referring to her as a woman? Or no?

Once she's made this clear to you, do you continue referring to her as a woman? Or no?

I mean, personally, I'm not harmed at all by her. I personally have no objections to this. I'll call her "she/her" and Samantha, because it seems rude to do otherwise. My mental classification will be "female" because to me female just means "person I refer to as she/her".

Other women have expressed that, for instance, they would not be comfortable dating Samantha because of it. I think that's reasonable.

If Samantha goes on a rant about how people are transphobic for not dating her, just because she has a penis, I will think she's full of shit and making the rest of us look bad.

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The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.

I note that this is an empirical statement, not a normative one (like "adults have the right to modify their body however they please, and it's none of your damn business whether you think it's a good idea or not"). Hypothetically, if you were presented with persuasive evidence that the majority of trans women who fully medically transition later come to regret their decision, feel markedly less happy afterwards (according to, for example, a PHQ-9 or HAM-D survey), or feel that their quality of life has declined as a result of their transition - would that persuade you that trans ideology is a bad thing on net?

Well, keep in mind: I know thousands of trans women online. That's a lot of evidence that it is successful. So any study has to overcome my prior, and explain why there's a huge cluster of visibly-happy trans women, but I never meet any of these people who regret it. I'm the sort of trans woman who wanders onto The Motte and TERF forums and so forth, and I have yet to encounter any such cluster. (There's certainly a few, of course)

I'm also referring to actual studies when I say we feel happier, so you'd have to reconcile why the two studies disagreed.

But, yeah, if 10% of trans women regret it, I think we maybe need to tighten up the gates a little bit, or at least make that warning a LOT clearer within the community. If 50% regret it, I think I'd have to spend a few days seriously reconsidering my world view.

This is all assuming actual regret, too. Right now, "happiness" is a bit tricky to measure: Maybe someone gained 100 happiness points from transitioning, but lost 150 because now they're subject to a lot more bigotry. I think in that case, the right solution is to fix the cultural bigotry, not to block transition.

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The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.

Yes, and this is a body dysmorphia, like phantom limb syndrome.

It may well be that the best treatment for gender/sex dysphoria is some form of physical transition surgery. But, if you can acknowledge that that is what is going on here, the only thing we really might disagree on is where exactly that line is on various axes of treatment.

Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.

Of course, you're no longer talking about anything like 'gender' as separate from sex. Trans women are natal males who are born with an intense desire to be female and vice versa. This desire can cause such serious stress that it becomes clinical and they must be treated in some way, possibly (and, honestly, probably, once the evidence base catches up) including surgical transition.

I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course

Yes, and they're the people I have a problem with. At heart, they're communists or the useful idiots of communists and their whole ideology destroys everything it touches, intentionally.

Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.

Or, in D&D terms, you'd want to find a way to get that cursed Girdle of Masculinity/Feminity removed, since unlike the Helm of Opposite Alignment, it doesnt update your brain to make you happy with the situation.

Exactly :)

Did it? Constant wars and plagues and famines and the rise and fall of empires over and over again, slavery, misery, death from disease. Childhood mortality at 50%, giving birth a 1 in 10 crap shoot of the mother dying. I don't think a lack of gender was helping that much.

giving birth a 1 in 10 crap shoot of the mother dying

This is almost certainly not true. Historical birthrates were high enough that an absolute majority of women would have died in childbirth were this so. The historical record does not seem to support this, and it’s biased towards elite women who probably had higher maternal mortality rates because they married younger.

I took a moment to look this up. An example of an old-timey rate, In Sweden and Finland in 1800, for example, around 900 mothers died for every 100,000 live births. That's about 1% per birth, so if you had more than 10 pregnancies (which a married young rich woman might as you say) maybe you could get lifetime risks around 10%.

There are still countries in africa where more than 1 in 20 women can expect to die in childbirth.

https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality

What? Maternal deaths were a mainstay of life for most of human history. What are you talking about?

The comment above yours has actual numbers- .9% per birth in Napoleonic-era Scandinavia, highest in the world right now is (predictably)South Sudan, at 1.2% per birth. There's no doubt been times and places slightly higher, but even the really crappy parts of sub-saharan Africa don't break 2% per birth.

Natural fertility ranges from 4-10 children per woman, depending mostly on female age at marriage. That would mean childbirth is a common, possibly the most common, way of dying for women in historical societies, but pretty far from a majority. And that checks out with deep third world numbers- no African country has a double digit percentage of women dying in childbirth.

Maybe you're right, certainly right if you did a bit of googling here, this is a nit and a pick, my overall point was that life was much much worse for most of history. Do you disagree with that?

P.S.

I also said one in ten, perhaps I was thinking over overall odds which are exactly in line with your research

Yes, one in ten certainly seems like a reasonable approximation of total lifetime risk of premodern maternal mortality. And of course childbirth before the Victorian era was orders of magnitude more dangerous than it is today.

Childhood mortality at 50 % was a good thing because it purged suboptimal genes from the genepool.

That isn't how it worked. Often is was just the one that was malnourished or late in the birth order, or unlucky in what crazy disease they caught. It wasn't some kind of fight to the finish. The smartest people haven't been winning some darwinian struggle to improve the human race since....ever.

That isn't how it worked

Yes it is.

Ah, then why aren't Congolese the smartest strongest healthiest people on the planet then? Maybe because natural selection doesn't always select for the traits we want, maybe it just selects people that will have the most people born to them. What a crazy stance to take, so "optimal" human life for you is just the ability to pump out 10 kids that can live in poverty?

...because tropical diseases and animals are infinitely less lethal than their fellow men ?

You really think you'd rather be exposed to Steppe Nomads than elephants ?

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Still likely a correlation between being the feeblest and not surviving childhood, versus these days in which serious conditions are extended ad infinitum for no particular benefit to society.

The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.

It's easy enough to just eat the L and start having uterus-only restrooms, which is open to anyone who has ever had a uterus. Intersex women who have never had a uterus due to developmental issues can use the non-uterus restroom. Same with uterus-only sports leagues, and uterus-only settings on dating apps.

That doesn't work, because the right to discriminate based on sex to protect women is grandfathered into law, while discrimination based on anything else is not, so if you declare your restroom uterus-only, then you will be sued for illegal discrimination based on medical status.

And if you didn't get sued, there would be no way to adjudicate cases, because you can hardly inspect each person personally, and the government isn't going to put uterus-possession on government issued ids as they used to do with biological sex.

And even if you somehow managed to overcome those challenges, everyone who has any power in society would agree that only bigoted nazi scum worse than a trillion Hitlers could even conceive of such a vile concept as a uterus-only restroom, which clearly have no purpose but to oppress poor innocent transwomen who just want to pee, so that absolutely no government or corporate institution would create them, nor would any private person who likes having a job, friends, family, or just being able to walk the street without angry antifa gang members throwing tomato sauce over their head.

The upshot is that approximately 0% of restrooms in the Western world will be uterus-only, so they might as well not exist for all practical purposes. If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.

If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.

There should be no hope for preserving female-only spaces or legal protections. The west has adopted "equality of the sexes" as foundational and women should have to bear the cost of that as much as men do. They shouldn't get to simultaneously claim equality and special treatment as it suits them.

EDIT: Grammar.

There is a lot to be said for that. After all, feminists (both liberal and radical) have relentlessly attacked male-only spaces to the point where they have all but disappeared, so abolishing female-only spaces too seems only fair. I do have some other views though.

One is that if you abolish female-only spaces entirely, then they should be accessible by all males, not just the ones that happen to identify as women. Instead of allowing transwomen into women's bathrooms, make bathrooms unisex. Instead of allowing transwomen to compete against women in the olympics, abolish the women's division. Instead of allowing transwomen into women-only train compartments, abolish women-only train compartments. And so on. Currently we are not seeing any such principled attack on women's spaces. Instead, it's all about letting males in provided that they identify as women, which is not the same as abolishing female-only spaces, it's just redefining what “female” means.

The other view is that maybe feminists are just wrong. Maybe it's good for society to have both male-only and female-only spaces. I think a lot of boys would benefit from male-only spaces and not in ways that are detrimental to women. And obviously women benefit from female-only spaces too: when it comes to sexual harassment etc. the most common configuration involves a male perpetrator and a female victim. Rather than accept the naive liberal feminist frame that the sexes are indistinguishable, we could embrace the idea that the sexes are equal but different, and support sex-segregated spaces for both.

Radical feminists are particularly hypocritical on this topic, in that they defend female spaces, but attack male spaces. I don't see why I should accept their frame entirely, even though I agree with their view on sex as being defined biologically.

Strategies like this won't work because the goal of trans women is to be accepted in all the same spaces that real women are, and if you give up the older definitions of "real women" and retreat to new ones, the trans movement will attack the new ones too. This is not a conflict that can be solved with clever wordplay.

Until they figure out how to clone organs, and transgender individuals start getting new reproductive systems installed....

I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.

Click the other link (about hacking the gender violence laws), it's working so far, or at least is giving them enough trouble that they have to go along with it for now. Also:

"There can be no fraud in the law, since the law is based on self-perception and contains no requirements. Those who question the gender condition I claim should be careful. We've already filed a complaint for transphobia against the National Federation of Gays, Lesbians and Trans, a woke association that criticizes us for not changing our appearance," explained, with the utmost seriousness, David Peralta, a 37-year-old Madrid "policewoman," secretary and co-founder of the Non-Normative Trans Association, to which most of Ceuta's policemen-turned-policewomen belong.

I think the key phrase here is “so far”. I think long-term, two things will happen.

One is that direct legal benefits based on self-declared gender-identity will be gradually abolished. I live in a country where the age of retirement used to be lower for women than for men (which was always dubious considering the higher life expectancy of women, but whatever). In recent years, two things have happened: the law was changed to allow people to declare their own sex, and the age of retirement for women was raised to the level of men, removing the obvious direct benefit of changing your legal sex for financial benefit. This makes a lot of sense: if you allow people to choose their legal sex they are just going to pick the most beneficial one, so you might as well make the benefits equal.

I know other countries are behind the curve. They stupidly believed the lie that nobody would change their sex just for practical reasons. They will find out soon enough that human opportunism knows no bounds, and they'll eventually abolish sex-based privileges too. (The alternative, abolishing unconditional gender self-identification, is no longer politically viable in the west.)

The second thing that will happen is that gender identification will be adjudicated by the public. We have already seen that with race: Shaun King gets to claim to be black, but Rachel Dolezal is vilified for the same thing. Buffy Sainte-Marie gets to claim to be Native American, but Elizabeth Warren is ridiculed for it. All of this is decided on the whim of the public.

We've seen this also with the Olympics: Imane Khelif gets to claim to be a woman because Russians claim she is male, and we currently hate Russians, so if they say A we will say B. It doesn't follow that an obvious male like Muhammed Ali (if he were still alive) could just hop into the ring and knock out some women; he needs to earn that right by having a sob story of being raised as a poor African girl who had to collect garbage to pay for school, and if someone hateable like Donald Trump says it's not fair to allow Muhammed Ali to beat up women, that would help his case a lot. Then Muhammed Ali gets to beat up women. But he needs to put in the work. Notably: he doesn't have to actually look or act female. The idea that females look or act in any way different from male is bigoted sexism. Instead, Ali has to demonstrate conviction that he believes he's female despite not looking or acting like it in any way whatsoever.

So that brings us back to the father who changes his legal sex to be able to see his kids. Is the court going to take pity on him? Again, it depends. Can he spin a convincing yarn about how as a kid he kept untying his nappies which proves conclusively he always had a preference for wearing skirts from a young age and is therefore female at heart, and that his marriage failed only because as a lesbian unfortunately born in a male body he was resented by his heterosexual wife, the evil TERF shrew, who poisoned the children's minds by reading them Harry Potter at bedtime, and now, to add insult to injury, wants to take hisher kids away from their fathermother? If so, the court will take pity on him and grant him custody. But again, he needs to sell the bit to them. He cannot expect to get female privilege just because he filled out a government form online which anyone can do.

They stupidly believed the lie that nobody would change their sex just for practical reasons. They will find out soon enough that human opportunism knows no bounds, and they'll eventually abolish sex-based privileges too.

The emerging problem with this is the inevitable backlash. The Culture style gender equality can't happen, because if too many men take up the offer to become women because they are treated better it will be declared not fair and do over.

I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.

According to Spiked:

In the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, almost 50 people have legally changed their gender since 2023. The vast majority of them work in the military or police – and 39 of them have changed from male to female. Only four of them have even bothered to change their names.

...

Aside from growing his hair slightly longer and wearing earrings, Perdigones has apparently made no effort to present as a woman. He hasn’t even bothered to shave his beard.

I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.

As one Ceuta-based army corporal, Roberto Perdigones, explained in El Español: ‘For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother.’

Ex-Dudes Rock. Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Italy, has an unusual combination of bureaucracy gone mad and extremely ineffective architects of bureaucracy. I hope the entire Spanish Army catches on to this grift.

I absolutely expect half of the men from my region to instantly convert to the female gender if gender switching is introduced and being a female let you pay less taxes or whatever.

Somewhat related: I know a few couples for whom legal divorce and living together filing separate taxes would be a decent federal income tax break (this can be the case for dual-moderate-income families). But I know nobody who has actually done this, even if it has come up in conversation, and even if only on paper and remaining "married" in a common-law and spiritual sense.

Lot of gypsies in Slovakia split up after child benefit was capped at three kids...

Spiked

The author of that Spiked article has a hilariously large blind spot. She claims it is outrageous that men can change their legal gender to get around 'gender-based violence' laws and to get higher salaries and pensions. She apparently has no problem with laws that give women arbitrarily higher pensions and salaries, and which protect only female victims of domestic violence and only if the aggressor is male.

A lesbian abused by her partner (bearing in mind that lesbian relationships are the most abusive type of the three male-female pairings) has no such protection, neither does a man victimised by a male or female partner.

She apparently has no problem with laws that give women arbitrarily higher pensions and salaries

Well, of course not. Why would she? Feminists believe that women are oppressed by living in a patriarchal society, and publicly mandated higher pensions and salaries are a band-aid intended to ameliorate the differential treatment women receive as a result of their sex. When male people claim to be women to take advantage of these policies, they're taking something which by rights they aren't entitled to, no different from stolen valour, or malingering to receive disability compensation you don't deserve. You might disagree with one or more points of her worldview (is it accurate to characterise the way women in the West are treated as "oppressive"? are Western women worse off than Western men, ceterus paribus? are higher pensions and salaries a fair or effective way of remedying this treatment? is the way Western society treats trans people qualitatively and/or quantitatively similar enough to the way it treats female people that trans people deserve the same compensation? etc.), but it's far from inconsistent.

A lesbian abused by her partner (bearing in mind that lesbian relationships are the most abusive type of the four male-female pairings)

I've heard this asserted so many times, but I've seen precious little hard evidence to back it up, and the more I see an assertion being made without any supporting link (e.g. "there are parts of the US where it's literally not a crime to murder trans people!") the more uneasy I get. I'm not saying this claim is false or made in bad faith, I would just really like to see some actual evidence in support of it rather than taking it for granted.

This article gives victimisation numbers of 66% 61% for bisexual women, 44% for lesbians and 35% for straight women. It does cite its sources but when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything, frustratingly. I think its citing this study. Pages 1&2 have the headline figures which match up.

Thanks for the link, this is really helpful. Unfortunately, the second link suffers from a limitation I suspected the last time this topic came up: not specifying the sex of the perpetrator.

This is obvious in the case of the proportion of bisexual women who've been victimised (i.e. that finding is perfectly consistent with 100% of the bisexual women who reported victimisation having been victimised by a current or former male romantic partner). But less obviously in the case of lesbians reporting victimisation: just because you currently identify as a lesbian doesn't mean you always did, or that you were never in a romantic or a sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex. There's no contradiction between currently identifying as a lesbian and previously having been in a relationship with a man who beat you up or stalked you. There's even a hypothetical causal mechanism worth investigating baked into the finding as it stands: if a significant proportion of lesbians are "political lesbians" who decided to swear off men after being abused by an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband (and straight women are disproportionately likely not to have been abused by an intimate male partner), then you would logically expect the proportion of lesbians who've been abused by a male partner to be higher than among straight women. Given the wording of the question as it stands, it's entirely possible that many of the bisexual or lesbian women surveyed have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman.

Going even further than the above, I've met more than one woman who called herself a lesbian despite currently being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a cis male boyfriend. There are probably plenty of women in relationships with trans women who still consider themselves "lesbians" (while being penetrated by their "girlfriend's" feminine penises, but that's neither here nor there). The wording in the study is sufficiently ambiguous that I can't even be confident that the set of "women" surveyed doesn't include trans women: maybe some of the lesbians and bisexual women reporting abuse in that study were trans women who'd been abused by a current or former romantic partner who was also a trans woman (in other words, male-on-male domestic abuse).

None of this is to argue that female-female romantic relationships aren't more likely to be abusive than male-female romantic relationships: the data you've presented are entirely consistent with that hypothesis (which I'll call Hypothesis A). My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis (Hypothesis B) outlined above, in which many of the lesbians and bisexual women who report intimate partner violence were actually abused by current or former male partners. To properly disambiguate which of the two hypotheses has better explanatory power, you would need to ask followup questions like:

  1. What is the sex you were assigned at birth?
  2. What is your sexual orientation?
  3. Have you ever been physically, emotionally, sexually abused by a current or former romantic partner?
  4. If "Yes" to Q3, what sex was the partner who abused you assigned at birth? (If you have been abused by more than one current or former romantic partner, please list the sexes they were assigned at birth sequentially.)

Minimally ambiguous language like the above would give us a more accurate impression of the relative sizes of the four populations (females abused by female romantic partners, females abused by male romantic partners, males abused by female romantic partners, males abused by male romantic partners) and give us better insight into whether Hypothesis A describes reality more accurately than Hypothesis B.

A caveat to the above: if I'm reading table 5 on page 20 correctly, zero lesbians reported being forcibly penetrated by a current or former romantic partner, which is far more consistent with Hypothesis A than with Hypothesis B.

My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis

I would say that the data are potentially consistent with your hypothesis, but I certainly wouldn't say they are equally consistent. If you're determined to find an explanation for lesbians reporting the highest rates of domestic violence victimisation, without accepting that lesbians might be perpetrating the largest amount of domestic violence, then your hypothesis can seem plausible. To me, it looks like an isolated demand for rigour.

I don't see why it's an isolated demand for rigour. If we lived in a world in which:

  1. 100% of the people identifying themselves as lesbians were female
  2. 100% of the people identifying themselves as lesbians exclusively dated and had sex with other female people (both currently and historically)

then the statement "X% of self-identified lesbians report having been abused by at least one romantic partner" would be synonymous with the statement "X% of female people who exclusively date other female people report having been abused by at least one romantic partner, who was female". But there are lots of ways in which people using language in sloppy or careless ways complicates this simple definition:

  • many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)
  • many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male
  • many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person
  • many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (a sufficiently common phenomenon that the term "gold star lesbian" was coined to describe the subset of lesbians who've never had sex with a man - the converse is very common as many female people take some time to fully understand their own desires)
  • many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)

In fact, it's not "isolated" at all: I think essentially any survey of this type suffers from the lack of specificity described above. If you carried out a survey on what proportion of people with or without mental illnesses had been victimised, the self-diagnosis trend would make the data trivial to contaminate: you've no way of distinguishing between people formally diagnosed with depression by a qualified healthcare provider vs. people who diagnosed themselves (because they feel sad sometimes). Without knowing the relative rates of the truly mentally ill vs. malingerers, your data tell you essentially nothing.

Either design a survey with better questions, or collect hard data. Healthcare providers can make inaccurate diagnoses, but as a rule, statistics on how many people have been diagnosed with depression cannot be contaminated the specific way surveys can. Likewise criminological data: if I was shown evidence that the proportion of female people who've been convicted for battering a female romantic partner was twice as high as the proportion of male people who've been convicted of battering a female romantic partner, I'd be satisfied. (If such evidence was presented, someone would probably make the counter-argument that police and directors of public prosecutions look the other way when a man batters his wife, but come down like a tonne of bricks when a lesbian playfully slaps her girlfriend, because Muh Patriarchy™. I would not be the one to make that counter-argument.)

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when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything

Possibly because the number the article claims is 61, not 66? Might also be some rounding going on, or combined numbers, which'd foil ctrl-f.

I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.

Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?

FWIW, it does seem like the truscum side is at least coherent and it's possible to make meaningful policy based around their demands. Gender dysphoria (regardless of its etiology) exists, and adding a bureaucratic process to classify people as truly trans or not seems like a bare-minimum requirement if you want to have any social institutions that take into account sex/gender.

As someone who has become deeply radicalized (and the truscum types lost anyway so who cares?) I'm not sure that their position is attractive either.

Gender dysphoria existing doesn't necessarily justify turning everyone into, essentially, a care provider to people with that condition by affirming their identity. Or being forced to deal with the inevitable externalities that come with allowing such changes to their perceived sex. They simply aren't women, even if they have a condition that makes them want to be and acknowledging it is dangerous.

Arguably the attractiveness of the "truscum" position is partly because it coincided of both low visibility of transpeople and also just a lower level of ability in legally enforcing their claims. One of these is intrinsic, the other contingent.

And, of course, there's the argument that the sort of society that wants to Be Kind^(tm) in this way simply will not/cannot maintain that sort of sharp distinction.

We only have a couple of examples but...

Having a bureaucratic process for transitioning is still better than the alternative. You've got to prove, to an outside observer, that you're "real." That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes, as well as empowering people to reject pure attention seekers as jokes.

It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.

That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes

The other thing that does this is let people transition socially if they want but simply insist that the only protected characteristic is sex.

It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.

The problem is that this danegeld has been paid once, and the outcome was predictable but not encouraging.

Two years ago I wrote an article (https://open.substack.com/pub/firsttoilthenthegrave/p/pay-no-attention-to-that-opinion-banner-open-in-app; scroll down to section VI, everything prior is about motte-and-bailey fallacies) which included an argument that society might consider housing trans women convicts in women's prisons conditional on their undergoing an assessment by a qualified mental health professional to determine whether or not they legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria. As much as I might complain about the absurdities of gender ideology, I am sympathetic to trans males who legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria, and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men. Of course there will be false negatives and false positives, but I feel like a certain amount of medical gatekeeping would go a long way towards separating violent opportunists like Karen White and Barbie Kardashian from the harmless men in genuine psychic distress who wouldn't hurt a fly. I feel like this is a compromise most well-meaning trans activists could get onboard with (particularly as it's dramatically less restrictive than the other popular gatekeeping proposal: making access to women's spaces conditional on having undergone bottom surgery).

and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men.

  1. Why did "small" sneak its way in here? Is this an established thing with people who suffer from GD?
  2. This argument always runs into the "what about the twinks?" question. What about a feminine gay man? They should risk rape unless they get marked as a GD haver?
  3. Why are whatever solutions we use to prevent rape for all men not good enough? And, if not, why shouldn't they be improved for all men instead of letting some men secede?
  4. I don't actually know that we can know that these men "wouldn't hurt a fly". We separate men from women precisely because we can't know or we'd use this screening method to have mixed-but-peaceful prisons. Mental illness doesn't make men harmless, especially to women who are weaker and less aggressive. There's an argument that they could be less violent than the median male inmate and yet still be violent enough to change female prisons negatively for female inmates.

I agree, you're right that policy is based on tradeoffs not ranking holy victims who get all that they want. My argument would be that sex segregated prisons (like sex segregated sports) are that compromise and the new versions don't actually cause significant improvements for the problems they cause.

I don't see how we've even put aside the "absurdities of gender ideology" because at least three of the questions above seem to be responding to a view that depends, in some sense, on gender ideology. I do not see why transwomen should be treated as fundamentally different from other men with issues and women specifically should pay the price of fixing said issues unless gender ideology has some substance and truth to it and they are, in some sense, women. It feels like the ratchet gets turned by people who believe the absurdity and attempts to helpfix their problematic policy still grandfather in their assumptions despite us recognizing the absurdity.

I also just don't think it's politically viable. The very argument - vulnerable men can get raped and women should give up some of the public good of a prison that excludes males - that drives the argument will lead to people suggesting that maybe less men should be raped and standards will drop.

The entire question of what to do with trans people in prison feels mostly like minority religious groups trying to help imprisoned co-religionists practice in prison. Kosher food, that kind of thing.

The entire small, vulnerable thing seems strange as a reason to be placed in women's prison. If a segregated unit for wusses is necessary, it can be created. But it isn't the women's prison.

Of course you'd then run into the question "if you can create a unit for wusses, thus tacitly admitting there is unsanctioned violence in prison, then a) why is it there? b) why are you isolating only some prisoners?".

Ironically, kosher food in prison is mostly served to non-Jewish inmates.

All excellent points which I hadn't fully considered at the time of writing.

Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?

Yes, and the tucute side has won through sheer exercise of social power. Now, we must suffer the consequences of the incoherence of their position.

Related, but subtly different. The truscum/tucute debate is about who is allowed to call themselves "really" trans: truscums think that the category should be subject to medical gatekeeping, tucutes that it shouldn't.

I'm not debating whether or not these Spanish men are "really" trans, merely pointing out that it's reasonable to assume that they haven't medically transitioned, given that they've made only the most token effort at social transition. One would logically expect the set of trans women who have medically transitioned to be a subset of those who have made a full-fledged social transition (new name, pronouns, wardrobe, hair etc.).

I wrote a little more about that here. tl;dr: I think those are temporary aberrations that will not survive in the long run.

In the long run those men will have to justify themselves, but note that it will not require removing testicles. The idea that women cannot have penises and testicles and testosterone levels over 10 times the 99th percentile of cis-women is hateful bigotry spread by far-right domestic terrorists, after all. Instead, these proud transwomen must defend their gender identity in woke terms, with an oppression narrative, and of course plenty of political virtual signaling. A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.

A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.

Or, when it comes down to it, Cathy Young or Christina Hoff Sommers (both women-born-women), c.f. Peter Thiel is not gay. You want the good identities, you gotta get with the program, otherwise you might as well be a cis-white-male.

Luckily, our Constitution bans titles of nobility. In Constitutionalist America, no one is allowed to be black or gay, only the subaltern white or straight.

Trade. Off.

Either "woman" means something, and men ain't it, or "woman" means whatever men want it to mean. There is no Panglossian halfway point where heckin brave transerinos get to be court ratified Real Women and shitlord chuds have to validate them despite their sexist patriarchal "facts". Either transgenderism is epistemically empty and futile or we're all men and women in nothing more than as much as it suits our personal agenda in the moment.

As the incentives to play this word game and the disincentives not to do so continue to stack up the remaining barriers will continue to be eroded. And if people will play it for the sake of joining a no-stakes casual chat app you can bet they'll play it for the sake of preferential treatment in the courts, but I repeat myself.

I think the silly word games is a feature and not a bug. They want to create a situation where the application is law is contradictory because they get to fill the gaps according to how it best serves their interests in the moment.

This. Its classic 1984 style "Newspeak." Putting people in a state of forcrd contradiction makes them confused and helpless.

Even without legal sanction calling oneself a woman was merely (and literally) a box ticking exercise. Despite living in the relatively unpozzed east, LGBT being a woke thing means the western dating apps are filled with self identified women. My lesbian friend showed me her filters and her preference matches, and she still gets flooded with dicks on the apps. Its all feminine penis stuff for the pozzed, and shameless 'you lesbos just need a REAL dick to know your place and this app lets me superlike you without review.' I understand the Chinese gay app Blued is just pure degeneracy and transphobia, and all lesbian apps whether western or eastern have been infested.

Singapore has a unique case where identity and sex are actually distinct: you can freely change your gender at will on official documents, but sex is based only on birth certificates. Since there are no legal protections for gender save for medical requirements, self declaration has no practical value here. Penises are conscripted regardless of presentation, and declaring oneself trans gets you out of conscription only because it is classified as a mental illness. Being homosexual used to be an excuse to get out of conscription too, but the army realized that actual gays will be the ones bullied in the army so they did not pose a threat to the integrity of a unit.

In this thread: “I can’t believe systems accept government ID!”

Also in this thread: “I can’t believe systems accept self-ID!”

Obtaining legal sanction—as Tickle apparently did—is a strictly higher bar than checking a box on the app.

Giggle’s method is something like an insurance company which ignores marriage certificates in favor of requiring a hand photo with your ring. Maybe they should be allowed to do so, but it’s hard to be surprised that the government definitions favor government-issued documents.

Obtaining legal sanction—as Tickle apparently did—is a strictly higher bar than checking a box on the app.

How is checking a box on a form for a new government ID a higher bar to clear than checking a box on an app?

In this thread: “I can’t believe systems accept government ID!”

Also in this thread: “I can’t believe systems accept self-ID!”

What's so hard to understand about "'man' and 'woman' are words describing material reality, and not someone internal sense of identity, and that's the definition the government should be using when applying their laws"?

Hey, I didn’t say a high bar.

In Victoria, it appears to require a “statutory declaration” plus a “supporting statement.” The latter means you need to convince at least one person you’re applying in good faith. There’s also a cooldown period, $140 fee, specific requirements for prisoners, and you have to return the previous document. That’s a good bit more commitment than downloading a new app.

It also attaches something resembling legal liability. Unlikely that you’d fall afoul of that, but it’s more than an app checkbox will do.

definition the government should be using

Oh, I think arguing against the government criteria is fine and coherent. I was thinking of IGI’s response blaming the very concept of government records. It was funny to see that alongside the more common, exact opposite concern. The duality of, uh, man!

Self identification and Government identification are both shams.

Identity is an intersubjective concept negotiated with the people you interact with on a case-by-case basis.

Indeed, the Giggle women do not believe Tickle to be one of them and Tickle has no power to change this. All Tickle can do is forbid them from acting according to their conscience by force of arms using the State.

It is perfectly fine to reject fiat coming either from an individual or from a government, and decide yourself how you choose to identify people. And I'll go as far as to say it's a natural right, which we either call "freedom of conscience", "freedom of speech" or "freedom of association" depending on how it manifests. A right that indeed is routinely trampled by Civil Rights law everywhere and its consequences.

Maybe I am too law brained but this outcome seems obvious? When governments draw distinctions between people they need a way to adjudicate who is classified how. For demographic markers they often issue some kind of identification that contains those markers and are considered authoritative. Sometimes (often?) there is a general process for updating those documents and markers when they are incorrect. When one undergoes the process for changing ones markers then, legally, one has changed classification.

This case was not lost today it was lost when, in 1994, Queensland started permitting one to change one's legal sex (if I read the opinion correctly) and, in 2013, when Australia amended the Sex Discrimination Act to cover gender identity.

when they are incorrect

This simply pushes the problem to the question of, "When are they correct/incorrect?" The silly version of this is that my driver's license has height on it. Suppose that for Person A, there was a genuine flubbing, a fat fingering. Their height was listed wrong. Presumably, they could request to have it changed on the document. On the other hand, Person B thinks that he's gotta be 6' tall for the dating apps, which in the future year of verified identity for everything, actually take in your driver's license information and use that in the algorithm. So, Person B waltzes into the DMV and says, "Well, obviously, you have a general process for updating these documents, so you need to list me as 6' tall." What should the government do when ye olde yardstick begs to differ?

I don't have anything to add here, but I had a flashback to a bad Tinder date. Halfway through a coffee the girl accused me of lying about my height, because 'her brother is my stated height and I'm shorter than him'. I said we should go find a measuring tape straight away and see who was wrong. May as well have thrown some gas on a fire. Kept accusing me of lying but wouldn't let me prove her wrong so I just shrugged and left.

One of my online dates.

Her: "Are you really 6 foot 2?"

Me: "Well not exactly, I'm 6 feet 1 and 3/4"

Her: "I could tell, you shouldn't lie about your height"

Me: -_-

Wow, just wow. The audacity on your part to attempt such a brazen rape by deception. Thank goodness she caught onto your machinations early; could you imagine the trauma she would have experienced had she only found out afterward that she got defrauded into lying with a sub-6'2.00" "man"?

6'2" is an accurate representation of your height to the nearest inch. It's not like you were 6'1.25" and ceiling'd it to 6'2" (which is still within the realm of acceptability), much less added 1-3" to your barefoot height as is NBA tradition. Women regularly and guiltlessly lie about their weight and bodycount, but I guess at least for this woman, men accurately rounding their height to the nearest inch is a bridge too far when it's upward.

YTA for insisting on a measuring tape instead of being a decent person and believing her emotional truth as a woman that you were lying about your height.

What an epic coffee moment, in more ways than one. At least you turned 360 degrees and bounced, leaving the sunk costs be.

Since thot-patrolling sisters is verboten nowadays, that could be a genius brotherly tactic to passively cockblock guys from banging your sister: Understating your own height to your sister so that she thinks all guys she encounters are shorter than they actually are, thus increasing her chances of getting the ick.

I hope you started carrying a measuring tape on dates after that.

“I’ve got six feet of rope in my truck. Want to see?”

Part of the Tinder starter pack along with chloroform, rag and breath mints.

Measuring tapes are the greatest aid to bavarian fire drills known to man.

I don't know what @IGI-111 is talking about. This is a great argument for the existence of government IDs, height on said IDs, and felony charges for anyone who lies about their government measured height.

I’d be loath to assume the government uses a general process when a laundry list of specific ones would do. When I had to get my corrective lens requirement dropped, there was a specific office and form. I think I had to bring a doctor’s note from the optometrist? So the specific height-change form probably says “please stand by this ruler.” If you disagree with that, tough.

I think you might be sounding like a transphobe. Tests, forms, doctor's notes, medical gatekeeping?

But no worries, I think @Gillitrut's position can come to your rescue. See, you don't have to actually make any decisions about what test/forms/notes/gatekeeping will occur. You can sit back, remain completely agnostic about any underlying Big T Truth, and just be law-brained enough to observe that different jurisdictions will make different choices. Some jurisdictions, we can call them the Transphobe Jurisdictions, have rulers and tests and stuff like you might want. Other jurisdictions, the Nontransphobe Jurisdictions, don't. Australia happened to choose already that they are a Nontransphobe Jurisdiction, having no rulers, no tests, no nothing. They have a much simpler process that lets you quickly and easily change the authoritative document, which declares, with authority (thus the adjective), how the law views the situation. One can then just sit back, be law-brained, and see that the conclusions follow from the premises.

...but now, Person B is considering going to a local amusement park, a private service provider. There happen to be two amusement parks in the area. Amusement Park Z is run by young, hip folks. They have electronic controls everywhere. You can scan your driver's license and swipe your credit card at the entrance, and then just use the nifty electronic system to access any rides you desire. Amusement Park X is run by old fogies, practically boomers. You have to hand physical tickets to the white guy standing next to the ride, and he points to the sign that says, "You must be this tall to ride." Can Person B sue Amusement Park X for not caring about the authoritative document and simply observing, "Your head don't touch the top of the ruler, dawg"?

After riding a ride that mayyyyyyyyyybe wasn't super safe for short people, Person B isn't feeling so good. B makes his way to the emergency room. B tells the doc everything about what's happened in the time period leading up to that moment. B's last physical act is to pull an insurance card out of a pocket and hand it to the doc, but since it was right next to B's driver's license in the pocket, both are grabbed and passed to the doc. (Can insert/remove a hypo here about B's last words being, "Please help me doc; do anything you need to.") Then, B passes out.

The doc runs a bunch of tests. In the process, they strip off B's clothes and replace them with a standard hospital gown. They can't help but happen to notice B's genitals in the process. The hospital bed automatically provides B's weight. Maybe even in the future, there's a ruler built into the bed, too. The tests come back, and they happen to include chromosomes and other indicators. All of the medical indicators correlate perfectly toward B having a particular sex, height, and weight. But the doctor noticed that B's drivers license disagrees on some/all of these things. The only problem is that the next step that the doctor has to take depends on one or more of those things. Perhaps it's just a dosage selection; perhaps it's an even more significant change in the course of treatment.

Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?

I'm pretty law-brained for a lot of things, but when it comes to these issues, I cannot escape the phrase, "Live not by lies." If we bake lies into the premises, the principle of explosion surely follows. It is utterly unsurprising that if we start off with baked in lies, then attempt to simply close our eyes to the entire realm of truth and try to proceed purely by law-brain, contradictions will follow.

The nice thing about having specific processes is that they aren’t all-or-nothing. Giving up one doesn’t mean going full postmodernist and rejecting all empirical measurements. The ruler can stay.

Same goes for your rather convoluted hypothetical. There’s no discrimination lawsuit in using the actual indicators for a treatment.

Why should the ruler stay, but not this app's restriction based on biological sex?

Because there’s a specific law calling out gender identity discrimination. (Sex discrimination, too, but I still don’t understand why that doesn’t apply.)

If short kings get a law passed, then the ruler might have to go. But that law won’t be passed, because trans activism doesn’t generalize to every possible category.

If you're going to split hairs here then how about this (in addition to what @ControlsFreak said): a FtM trans wants acne medication. The medication is known to be harmful to pregnant females. The patient is visibly pregnant. Were they biologically male, the acne medication would be the right prescription with minimal side effects. The patient's government issued id says they are male.

Can the patient sue the doctor for discrimination if they refuse to give them the prescription? If the doctor relents and her baby is born with birth defects can they sue the doctor for that?

And if you're going to nitpick about pregnancy status being different from sex, then imagine a drug that has significantly different effects on women vs. men, or that she isn't visibly pregnant. Use the "Least Convenient Possible World" to avoid easy outs and address the meat of ControlsFreak's argument.

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I don't follow. Here you said that "[t]here’s no discrimination lawsuit in using the actual indicators for a treatment". So, I must ask again, given that there's a specific law calling out gender identity and sex discrimination,

Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?

We have a specific law. It is applied to private service providers. The document is authoritative.

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Rulers for thee not for me

What should the government do when ye olde yardstick begs to differ?

Isn't the anti-trans position the opposite, though? You're saying that if someone was "born" 5'10" and somehow gained 2 inches of height, they're still 5'10".

If you can point to a single example of a biological male who grew into becoming a biological female or vice-versa, we can perhaps have a conversation about what to do in that case.

"Correct" and "incorrect" are relative to the government's purposes in having the mark on the document. Often this is to aid in identification of the person presenting the document but the marks can serve other purposes. In the case of height, having a listed one dramatically different than your apparent one would be a problem for using it to identify you. So they try to keep the height listed on your document close to your apparent height (as determined by yardstick).

The governments purposes for tracking sex should not be about the feelings of the individual being tracked, but about keeping accurate records for the census, crime, and other statistics. I'd say that having a listed sex other than your apparent (actual) one is a major problem.

the government's purposes ... other purposes

What are the purposes of such marks when it comes to private service providers, say, like amusement parks and emergency rooms?

It depends on the private service providers own policies and what kinds of obligations the government may have created for them.

The only reason the above case exists is because the government created a legal obligation for private service providers to treat people a certain way based on the mark on their official documentation. As far as I know there is no similar legal requirement to treat people a certain way based on their height. If there was, then a similar lawsuit against an amusement park may very well be successful!

In the emergency room context the only purpose a sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment. If you already know those other biological facts it's not clear to me what further information one is getting from someone's legal sex classification. In any case doctors should determine medical treatments on the basis of the relevant biology, not the legal sex classification. Indeed it's easy for me to imagine a scenario where a doctor denying someone treatment on the basis of their legal sex classification, rather than their biology, would be the basis for a sex discrimination lawsuit! Imagine a trans woman goes to a doctor and requests a prostate exam. Perhaps she has or hasn't had bottom surgery but in any case still has a prostate. The doctor refuses on the grounds her relevant identity document says she is female, though the doctor does acknowledge she has a prostate. I think such a doctor would likely lose a sex discrimination lawsuit. After all, if she had shown up as someone with "male" on their identity document and with a prostate the doctor would presumably have performed the exam. She was denied a treatment relevant to her biology because of her legal classification. Sounds like sex discrimination to me!

In the emergency room context the only purpose a sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment.

One could just as easily say that in a digital app setting, the only purpose a government sex classification serves is as a shorthand for certain other biological facts that may be relevant for treatment. If you already know those other biological facts it's not clear to me what further information one is getting from someone's legal sex classification. In any case apps should determine digital treatments on the basis of the relevant biology, not the legal sex classification. Where does your argument fail?

What is the "treatment" in this context and what is the relevant biology? In the medical context treatments very straightforwardly interact with a patient's biology. That's the point. What's the app analogue?

Don't need an analog, at least not according to the standard you've set forth. You just said that the "only purpose" a government sex classification serves is as a shorthand. They saw the shorthand, they determined that other facts were known, and they used the other facts. Amusement parks did it, emergency rooms did it, and digital apps did it. Unless you have some extra, currently hidden government purpose, these cases seem precisely analogous for the test you've set forth. There's nothing in your current test that says that some sorts are okay and other sorts aren't.

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In the case of gender, I would argue that it’s at least in part about safety. Men are orders of magnitude stronger than women, and given that most instances of stranger rape occur in private spaces, keeping natal males out of women’s restrooms, changing rooms, and sleeping areas is simply the best way to prevent rapes in those spaces.

Height and weight are more about proof of identity in general. If you match 5/5 of the identifying characteristics listed on your ID, it’s pretty clear it’s your ID.

Men are orders of magnitude stronger than women

No, they're not 100x stronger. Did you mean multiple standard deviations stronger?

Yeah, misspoke, sorry. But the point being that unless a woman is basically a semi-pro athlete (let’s say that she’d be competitive in a small school college sports program) her chances of successfully defending herself against a minimally athletic male in a one on one situation is fairly small. It’s why I basically laugh at the “learn self defense for women” programs. Unless you’re seriously training and competing in combat sports you aren’t going to have enough skill to win out against a male with enough extra muscle mass to manhandle her.

Isn’t ‘self defense for women’ basically ‘don’t be shy, kick him in the nuts and run away’?

I’ve heard that ‘kick him in the nuts’ is very bad advice because they aren’t vital (unlike eyes, say) and the pain is basically washed away by adrenaline and just makes him angrier. Works against a dweeb who’s being pushy, but not against somebody accosting you in an alley.

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Yeah I agree. The judge read the law right, it's what the law says that is the problem.

Queensland is headed for a landslide LNP win soon, it'll be interesting to see if the new parliament is game to change this. I think probably yes - both sides of politics seem to agree that trans issues are working for the right currently (with Labor trying to downplay them), and QLD doesn't have an upper house to get in the way.

Indeed. The slope was always slippery.

Agreed. If there is a legal status, the government will treat people according to the legal status the government recognizes them as. Not only is that a convenient dodge for what the status 'should' be, it's about the only way for a government to consistently apply said status. If the government did NOT address people by the government-identified status, paradoxes occur.

I'm fairly sure this is what the US military already does, but I'll leave it to any of our posters to vouch for that.

After all, if an app for women cannot keep an AMAB out, how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.?

I'm curious why you'd expect the latter to come later. There's already a whole circuit of the United States where the ADA requires transwomen be treated as women in every single one of those spaces, despite explicit text in the ADA disclaiming such. It's been two years. SCOTUS shrugged. It's done; just a matter of how long until the rest of the courts join in.

Well, these are different countries we're talking about, so I don't know if talking about sequences of events here makes much sense.

But to answer your question - it's a basic sales tactic to get someone to agree to something small so they'll agree to something big, so assuming things would happen in this particular sequence seems like a pretty safe bet. Though I guess you'll also find exceptions.

That's fair, though I think it applies there, too.

I get how the small-ask-big-ask theory works, but I think there's a useful to notice that's not really how things have been going. In many cases, the big asks come first, in no small part because they're (perceived as: trying to get actual numbers on how many people are effected by these policies is like pulling teeth) much more important.

The vigilante (vagilante?) approach would be to reinstate Tickle's account with a 'YWNBAW' flair and let the TERFs bully him mercilessly until he gets the point -- this is kind of how unofficially segregated spaces have been maintained for ages.

What are the cyber-bullying laws like in Australia?

Cyber-bullying laws in Australia are strict and getting stricter all the time. I bet YWNBAW will fit under the 'anti-discrimination' part of the legislation. Even random commenters can get publicly funded human rights commissions sicced on them, though they may prevail: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/nov/04/qut-computer-lab-racial-discrimination-lawsuit-thrown-out

Furthermore, the app is all but dead now, due to the litigation. I'm pretty sure they know that there'd be a little too much thoughtcrime on the internal forums, the eSafety Commissioner or someone would eviscerate them so they shut up shop. This is a country that routinely bans the import of doujins and tried to globally censor away images of a terrorist stabbing, they'd find something to charge Giggle with.

how can all the other controversial spaces like sports, prisons, waxing salons, etc.?

I advocate for having trans women use waxing salons that service minority populations who don’t buy into all that. Just to see what happens. Prisons I don’t think anyone cares, but sports is probably going to solve itself eventually.

waxing salons

I think that was a reference to Jessica Yaniv, who tried to get scrotum waxing from estheticians that sold labia (etc.) waxing services. She launched a human rights complaint against the (independent, immigrant) people who denied her, claiming that they offered female genital waxing, and therefore were discriminating by not waxing her female genitals.

She lost the case, eventually.

It's worth mentioning that Yaniv lost that case only because of his blatant racism against Asian immigrants, not because the court took a principled position supporting the right of female workers to refuse service to males.

(If the court has to dedicate four pages of the conclusion to the “racial animus” of the plaintiff, that's usually not a good sign.)

This fragment sums up the position of the court:

I agree generally with Ms. Yaniv that a person who customarily offers women the service of waxing their arms or legs cannot discriminate between cisgender and transgender women absent a bona fide reasonable justification. [..] However, the Represented Respondents have persuaded me to dismiss these complaints on the basis that they have been filed for improper motives or in bad faith.

He was simultaneously - too early, hitting another group in the progressive stack and too unsympathetic (read weird/non-passing/masculine aggressive). If memory serves he did get to use the full weight and support of whatever Canada's Human Rights Division is called and they independent business had to defend themselves.

I'm curious how that case would go now?

Prisons I don’t think anyone cares

A minority of women seem pretty angry about other women getting raped in prison by male sex offenders who have had a revelation that they're actually female..

I'm pretty angry about it too, for the record.

While I was responding to @ChickenOverlord and @ControlsFreak, I noticed something weird about the whole case.

This opinion is surprisingly unconcerned with defining a woman. It depends on the gap between two existing definitions. Technically, it would have been the same if Tickle had been FtM. Even more technically, it doesn’t actually privilege the Queensland definition.

When Giggle used visual inspection as a proxy, they defined “sex” as sex-assigned-at-birth. Since Tickle didn’t look feminine enough, she was probably assigned male at birth, so she could be legally excluded, since sex is not actually a protected class*.

This case said no, you’re actually proxying for gender identity, which is. Queensland’s definition of “sex” is sex-as-recorded-in-our-registrar. They allow legal sex changes, but for obvious reasons, they’re (almost?) entirely done by people with particular gender identities. Punishing someone because her sex-assigned-at-birth doesn’t match the sex-recorded-by-Queensland is punishing a protected class.

In other words: disparate impact. When the only people hurt by your policy happen to fall in a particular category, and that category is protected, you’re liable. There was no other way to read this law.

* No, I still don’t understand how the Sex Discrimination Act explains that.

This might seem petty, but 99% of the transgender debate is about the meaning of words, so I have to object to your usage of the phrase “sex assigned at birth”:

When Giggle used visual inspection as a proxy, they defined “sex” as sex-assigned-at-birth.

They most certainly do not, because radical feminists like the ones behind Giggle do not believe in ”sex assigned at birth” at all. Rather, they believe in biological sex, as a property of the real human body a person inhabits, and as it exists before medical interventions are taken to turn healthy boys and girls into transsexuals.

Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.

The term is nonsensical because sex is never assigned, it is simply observed, not just at birth but on many occasions through a person's life, the first time often long before birth, as part of ultrasound screening. In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not.

What commonly happens at birth is that a doctor or midwife performs a visual inspection of a newborn baby, makes a diagnosis, and records the observed sex on a birth certificate. But that's the map, not the territory, and sometimes the assessment is wrong (as in the case of intersex males born without visible external genitalia), and sometimes it is not recorded at all (increasingly, western countries allow omitting the observed sex from the birth certificate).

Of course, the absence or incorrectness of government records has no bearing on reality. Humans have a biological sex whether that sex is recorded or not, and this is what the Giggle moderators try to assess, imperfectly, using photos and other metadata as proxies. They certainly don't believe in a nonsense concept that human sex is assigned at birth.

Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2010. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.

That is not true, as a Google Books search can easily demonstrate. It was mostly (though not entirely) used to refer to intersex people.

Yes, “sex assignment” was used to describe cases where the biological sex was indeterminate, and thus some judgment must be made because biological sex was unclear. But “sex assigned at birth” to describe a person's natural unambiguous biological sex was unheard of until recently.

In 1995, absolutely no person wrote “Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”. As in: I claim nobody on the planet has written that combination of words throughout that entire decade. Do you disagree?

Meanwhile, I could easily imagine that line being written today, and rather than being considered weird, it would be considered quite woke.

“Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”

You're the only person to say it ever, if Google is to be believed, so it is perhaps unsurprising that you can't find anyone from 1995 saying it

Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014.

https://columbialawreview.org/content/sex-assigned-at-birth/ would suggest otherwise. "Not common on the internet" hardly means the term wasn't ever used. A simple Google search suggests there's examples of usage dating back into the 40s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=AMAB&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 I mean, it seems really odd that "AMAB" goes back to 2000. Did it used to mean something else?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22assigned+male+at+birth%22&year_start=2000&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=1 If nothing else, "assigned male at birth" takes off a couple years earlier, 2012

Very shoddy methodology - basically all noise and no light here.

I used that phrase because of something the judge wrote at the start of page 3:

They consider sex to mean the sex of a person at birth, and that this is unchangeable.

While I’m sure Ms. Grover would not use my phrasing, especially the word “assigned,” I needed a way to distinguish the immutable view from the legal one which Queensland embraced.

You could just say “biological sex”, “medical sex”, “natural sex” or “real sex”.

Even “sex of a person at birth” is preferable to “sex assigned at birth”, in that it acknowledge that sex is a property of a person, rather than being assigned to that person.

Thanks for getting me to take another look at it fresh.

the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

I have decided that “gender identity” comes within “other status” in Article 26

Questions about yardsticks are back on the table. The Status Games are alive and well in Australia. What an absolutely incoherent mess we keep getting ourselves into.


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