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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Is the future trans? The Gay Rights Movement Has Been Hijacked by a Radical Transhumanist Agenda

“Transgenderism” is a word acting as a social bridge between transsexualism and transhumanism. It is an umbrella term with weak borders that allows this bridging quality to transhumanism to nimbly evade scrutiny. Transsexualism is largely an adult male fetish that compulsively objectifies and covets womanhood. Men with autogynephila (the professional name for this form of transsexualism) seek to medically appropriate the sexed humanity of women by purchasing surgical simulacrums of their sexed reality, in parts, to assuage their compulsion. It is the apex of the sex industries, reducing women to parts for commercial and sexual use.

“Transgenderism” is an offshoot of both these words and is being used as a rebranding of transsexualism to appeal to a new, youthful market. It is a harbinger of the genetic and technological manipulations we are being conditioned to accept via transhumanism obscured by co-opting the familiar branding of a wildly successful human rights movement. In reality, it is an anti-human agenda.

The next most crucial step toward the transhumanist goal is to usurp human reproduction and move it into the tech sector. The assisted reproductive market is currently $25.6B and is projected to reach $41.4B by 2030. This market is being invested in by many of the same elites investing in the gender industry, who are invested in the medical and tech sectors in general, and who are simultaneously using the LGB human rights political infrastructure to abolish sexual dimorphism—reproductive sex. It’s a perfect fit because individuals in same-sex relationships will need the assisted fertility market if they wish to reproduce—and only those with considerable resources can finance these risky medical procedures. The rest will stand as the medical refuse of eugenicists, sterilized for life.

I don't think the average person in support of transgenderism thinks of themselves as a transhumanist or reads transhumanist literature, they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense. Combined with a runaway social constructionist impulse and Rousseau-like mindset where the individual is always prior and it's society that corrupts them and you get to the situation where a tiny fraction of people can overthrow the most basic assumptions of a society. Transhumanism by way of rampant individualism .

I also think it's..dubious to frame transgenderism as-such as merely autogynephilic men. Even Blanchard has a two-part typology with homosexual males and autogynephilic males. Even if we want to reduce transgenderism to a mental illness or fetish in men, the article -by playing the traditional leftist game of trying to "solve"' problems by insisting they're caused by male issues - ignores the fastest growing "'transgender" population: young girls.

This would fit well with the trans-as-transhumanism position: girls who would usually go through puberty (a messy time) and the difficult adult life are instead offered a solution to their life's problems via transhumanist surgeries and procedures. Don't like your life? Go be anyone else you want. Never mind that we aren't actually the Culture and you can't mold yourself at will.

Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans. I personally see no reason to validate any of the attempts to problematize the sex binary and plenty of reason not to. But clearly the march of progress won't be stopped by me or anyone. Medical technology will improve and people will have the ability to mold themselves more and more.

So really, is the only sin of "transpeople" being early?

So really, is the only sin of "transpeople" being early?

Is the only sin of people who think they're persecuted by the CIA but really aren't, not being CIA targets? After all, CIA persecution does really happen.

I'd say no. People who falsely think they're persecuted by the CIA have skewed perception and skewed reasoning (and may not care about reasoning at all). It's coincidence that they latched onto something that really happens. It's not very different from latching onto something that can only happen in the distant future (like transhumanism), or not at all. In all those cases, their "sin" is disconnection with reality.

As a transhumanist, the standard culture war trans issues bore me. I don't really care too much either way. Not sure how common of a position this is, but I feel there are far more important things happening in the world.

Just to notify you that you are allowed to care about more than one thing at the time. That there is war in Ukraine or what have you, doesn't make it so we can't talk about other less important things.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about it. I guess I'm adding in that as someone who is a transhumanist (which this post is directly related to) I don't see transgender stuff as an all important wedge into the glorious utopia or anything.

I was sympathetic to transhumanism prior to supporting transgender rights to self-modify, simply because of the order in which I encountered both ideas. A clean dividing line between the many ways our lives are technologically augmented and self-modification made little sense to me.

I'd say that trans rights makes me less sympathetic to transhumanism, in the same way that the popularity of quack medicine makes me less sympathetic to the libertarian idea of letting everyone take any medicine they want.

I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no". Yes, there are some aspects of the modern trans movement that can seem somewhat like a transhumanist end-goal. But they're bedfellows with other people who seem to just want to cause chaos. People who want to take away some of the logic we have in our society, and divorce ideas from where they were traditionally associated.

For example, it's a common trans-adjacent complaint nowadays that when you're referring to reproductive health, you shouldn't say "women", you should say "people with uteruses", because there are trans-men who have uteruses who are affected, too. I see this sort of warring all the time all over my facebook, for example, after the SCOTUS issue this year, people saying "don't erase trans-men from the reproductive rights issue! trans men will suffer as well" as if that even matters, relatively speaking, or is at the forefront of anyone's mind.

Let's say we did have completely perfect transhumanist technology that would allow women to perfectly and in all regards become men. Do you think that these activists I mentioned above would be okay with us going back to the more traditional usage of language? No, I don't expect they would. They want anyone to be able to be called anything, even if they don't choose to fit the biological bill. They want to change the categories to be entirely "you're just whatever you want to be", not just "you're just whatever your current biology supports". They're making up new categories that never existed before, all sorts of in-between, or not related, genders, and then they're also taking all preexisting categories and saying none of the previous definitions matter at all for it. In-effect, they don't want transhumanism, they just want to disrupt the system and anyone who wants to have coherent categorization.

I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no".

I think this is dangerous underestimation modern "transgender" movement. To large extent it is an on the ground application of ideas from Queer Theory, most importantly a revolt against "normativity" such as fight against cisheteronormative society. All you have to do is just to write down the vocabulary used and check where it originated. It is exactly how it sounds, it is not even fight for making queer people accepted as "normal" in society - similar to how early gay right movements wanted to get some rights and then be done with that. It is revolt against the very concept of normalcy, even to say that something potentially can be considered as normal or abnormal is oppressive and needs to be opposed.

And I agree that this is very much in line with transhumanism. Want to live as a cat person littering in sandbox toilet with somebody who transplanted his lower body into titanium appendage with extra ultraviolet sensor hanging from his left ear in polyamorous polycule with a literal lizzard? Nothing to see here, there are literally no valid philosophical or moral grounds to challenge this lifestyle in any way. In fact any criticism or pushback is (paraodoxically) something that is abnormal and needs to be squashed and this lifestyle needs to be accepted and supported exactly in order to fight against normativity.

Transsexualism is largely an adult male fetish that compulsively objectifies and covets womanhood. Men with autogynephila (the professional name for this form of transsexualism) seek to medically appropriate the sexed humanity of women by purchasing surgical simulacrums of their sexed reality, in parts, to assuage their compulsion. It is the apex of the sex industries, reducing women to parts for commercial and sexual use.

Per UCLA, referencing a pair of CDC datasets, “Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.”

Source: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/

and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.

But...are they Catholic atheists or Protestant atheists?

More effort than this, please.

Fair enough. Deleted.

They hated him for he spoke the truth.

My understanding is that the rapid expansion of women as the leading "trans" group is actually what's led to some clamp down in Europe on gender medicine: basically the logic is that most of their long-term interventions were studied on typically males with long-term dysphoria (think Buck Angel explicitly being an experiment) but now a lot of younger women are showing up claiming to be trans, perhaps in clusters (ROGD is...controversial and it's so hard to dig through the noise on this topic). So everyone is slowing down and doing more research.

I think further study is warranted; agreed. Just wanted to highlight, albeit indirectly, the idea that autogynephilla is the primary driver of transsexualism isn’t a claim rooted in certainty.

The arc of history certainly bends towards people having greater ability to reshape their biology, leading to the devaluing of fixed identities.

If a man is able to use advanced medical technology to give himself (now herself) a functioning uterus and ovaries, and he convincingly looks the part, I would have no problem saying that he has truly become a woman in all senses.

, I would have no problem saying that he has truly become a woman in all senses.

The sex differences in emotional processing, cognition etc are .. irrelevant ? Women care about entirely different things mostly. A man who somehow didn't change his brain at all but got female biology would end up being a very butch lesbian, not exactly 'truly a woman'. A woman, but a very unusual one.

The sex differences in emotional processing, cognition etc are .. irrelevant ? Women care about entirely different things mostly. A man who somehow didn't change his brain at all but got female biology would end up being a very butch lesbian, not exactly 'truly a woman'.

Do this apply to AFAB women as well? Is a woman who is stoic, assertive, things-oriented, solution-oriented not 'truly a woman' even if she is built like a wet dream?

Sure, such one is a woman, but will probably never fit in with other AFABs, at least, same way a feminine gay guy doesn't really fit in with other men.

If that's an offer to find people one, you're going to have a lot of takers here lol. Good luck through.

The sex differences in emotional processing, cognition etc are

Hormone driven and vary widely by individual anyway.

Yet iirc, the if you honestly look at personality traits and compare big samples, there are two distinct clusters with not much overlap.

I suspect the same would be true if you graphed hormone levels.

That's true for testosterone at least.

Estrogen has pretty profound cognitive effects (though of course hormones aren't literally everything). For example, transitioning MTFs often describe feeling way more emotional, crying more often, etc., while transitioning FTMs describe the same thing in reverse.

Anecdotally, from the perspective of a cis woman who doesn't have a problem with trans women*, the ones I'm familiar with read to me as nerdy girls in terms of affect and personality.

*my own problems with transness / gender ideology / whatever are all about <18yo children transitioning — the adult trans people I know don't bother me (regardless of when they themselves began transition, which I rarely even know)

For example, transitioning MTFs often describe feeling way more emotional, crying more often, etc., while transitioning FTMs describe the same thing in reverse.

I do wonder about that. While there is indeed a very strong hormonal effect, I also have the feeling that people transitioning, particularly male to female, have an exaggerated sense of gender roles to live up to, so they think "women are more emotional, cry more easily and more plentifully, express emotions more easily" and so on, thus they expect to feel a heightened sense of emotion and play up to that. A sort of placebo effect, if you like; 'to be a Real Girl means to be very emotional and now that I'm becoming a Real Girl by taking hormones I should also be very emotional'.

There's this thing called 'brain development'. Affected by hormones. It's the reason gay men seem feminine - there is an epigenetic mechanism that protects the embryo's brain from too strong effects of cross sex hormones. When it fails you get homosexuals, or that's one of the current theories.

There's a good number of ex-men as Sailer calls them who still behave like .. men. You are surely familiar with the plight of Alice Dreger. That predates world war T.

I'm imagining us entering into a weird low-level equilibrium trap where the psychological differences remain but a combination of tech and laws (which already exist) make it so that we can't distinguish.

It's...going to be bad for everyone, like a form of societal face-blindness. We'd know people are doing things but we have no way to drill down on the group responsible.

Well..maybe not everyone. It really simplifies the DEI drive to find "women" for any job predominantly favored by men.

Not in all senses unless there's a way to undo all the bodily formative processes that has been going since birth, after the change. I just read a report where a "trans" volleyball player, who were allowed to play in girls league, severely injured a member of opposing team (basically broke her face and caused severe concussion) because of his ability to generate way more force than any of his peers are able to produce or withstand. Even if you somehow stitch on a uterus and make it work, by some technological magic, there will be other differences that are relevant in other contexts.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant if he becomes a woman down to the molecular level, female bone structure, average female strength, etc. So no possible physical test could distinguish him from a natural woman.

Unless we invent time travel, I'm not sure it's going to be technologically possible any time when our current understanding of physical reality is in any way relevant.

Yeah, but if he still has a male brain in a female body? That is, a brain influenced/conditioned by male hormones, socialisation as a male, and all the rest of it?

Suppose we managed to transplant a cis man's brain into a woman's body. Is he now she? What if he declares that he is still a man? Is the only difference whether the person claims to identify as male or female?

If you have a man's brain in a woman's body and he still behaves and thinks and acts like a man, is he now a woman?

The idea of gender-flipping by getting a body of the appropriate sex from the start is an old SF fantasy, but I do wonder more how that would work out in reality. When I was younger, I thought it would work, but seeing some trans people online (and yes, I know that's not the ideal), I think there is much less easy change-over than the idea posits. What about trans women who want to keep their 'girl cock'? What about the likes of this person?

If it were possible to create a completely new, convincing, and cohesive identity by way of adding it to cart and clicking checkout for a very affordable price, I imagine this would delete 95% of the controversy around transgenderism.

People don't care that the woman in front of them used to be a man so much as care that the man in front of them who has squeezed into a dress and is wearing a wig demands to be treated as a woman. Asking people to deny what they sense is the outrage. Asking us socialize the cost of $100k in surgery so an old man can look like an old man with scars in a dress is the outrage.

I'm not saying any of this is good necessarily just that I don't expect miracles on this kind of trans acceptance front. Indeed, the best thing for trans acceptance would be orders of magnitude improvement in body/behavior modification treatments.

There’s a bit of a motte and bailey at play. Imposed speech and subsidized treatments are objectionable under fully liberal principles. Insofar as our American myths are really big on such principles, this makes for a defensible motte.

Admitting that the presentation is unconvincing, that trans women aren’t women enough to date, or trans men aren’t man enough to compete in men’s sports...these positions are tricky. Ultimately, they still get the aegis of liberal mythology. Whether or not the intentions were pure, it remains relatable to make such objections because the common cultural basis is so pervasive.

Trying to ban trans “ideology” or general services, to wage the culture war, is fundamentally illiberal. There are good reasons to be illiberal! Yet they must be argued on the merits once we leave the common ground of liberalism. Neither side of this particular argument is invested in doing so, in part because the myths make such a good weapon. This is what the parent article has skipped—assuming from the start that trans(humanism) is evil.

Trying to ban trans “ideology” or general services, to wage the culture war, is fundamentally illiberal

Could you give concrete examples here? Because, quite frankly, I believe the word "ban" has been abused by activists to the point I don't trust it.

For example: the GOP has not "banned" transwomen from competing, despite what people say. They've insisted that men compete with men in the male/open category. As is traditional.

Even people who could be said to have "banned" elements of trans medicine didn't ban it as such. Limiting a potentially harmful drug to clinical trials to see the impact is not a ban on trans people getting services, it's basic medical good practice.

Things that have been banned (or people have attempted to ban) like sexually explicit books in kid's libraries are, imo, well within the usual liberal allowances made. Until recently.

I think the reason the logic of this article seems so strained is probably that there's a segment of the conspiracy-theorist community which has latched onto "transhumanism" as a buzzword and have a distorted idea of what it is. This allows them to equate stuff like "X once gave money to some sort of group with ties to self-described transhumanists" with stuff like "X wants to inject you with a chip to control your brain". Search 4plebs for transhumanism to see some examples, or conspiracy-theory sites like Transhumanism.news. The author seems to have picked up some of those ideas about transhumanism.

they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense

Except it's not "whatever you say" - transracialism is largely taboo and otherkin had more success but still failed to become a mainstream part of social justice ideology. Rather there is a whole ideological framework for how people not only can but should transition if they "are transgender". Then there is a social environment in the social justice community (and often among professionals in trans healthcare) with a heavy bias towards encouraging people to think they're transgender at any supposed sign and then "affirming" those who think they are. Like Scott's old post about conceptual superweapons that talks about medical testing, except that was supposed to be an analogy.

The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo

But if one side has a superweapon, it's impossible to argue for the other. If the threshold starts at forty, and one doctor says "But we can't be the sorts of monsters who would refuse a potential cancer patient live-saving surgery!", and this argument is a deeply-ingrained part of medical culture and the other doctors don't want to be tarred as cancer-sympathizers, then the threshold goes to 30. Then another doctor brings up the same argument, and the threshold goes to 20. Soon the threshold is at zero and they're referring rashes and hay fever for surgery and no one can protest because they don't want to look Pro-Cancer.

Part of allowing only one side of the argument might be that you sometimes see arguments like "Even if you're worried you aren't 'really transgender' (and if you're wondering you almost certainly are!) there's no harm in having the body you want.", ignoring the serious and lifelong negative effects. But this isn't part of any broader commitment to transhumanism. If anything the mandate towards affirmation of "legitimate" identities means things tends to get squeezed into a dichotomy, where something like transracialism must be not just "weird" and "probably a bad idea" but problematic and racist. Because if it wasn't there would be pressure to apply the same sort of logic used for "misgendering".

Finally, remember the main emphasis of transhumanism is not on people satisfying arbitrary preferences about their bodies to begin with, it's on making people better. Transhumanist fiction might have the occasional person who decides to be downloaded into an octopus body or something, but that's an irrelevant sideshow compared to intelligence-enhancement and immortality, especially outside the realm of fiction where real-life transhumanists are less concerned with imagining exotic visuals than authors are. Needless to say, the social justice community is often intensely hostile to such improvements, being more concerned with the idea that improvements to longevity or intelligence might be used by the rich than with the enormous benefits they would bring. They are also very hostile to anything that can be interpreted as "eugenics", which a lot of the easier transhumanist technologies could be classified as. Unlike the general public they are sometimes even hostile to the idea of curing disabilities and with the idea that being disabled is indeed objectively worse for reasons beside society's "ableism". Those deaf parents who deliberately choose to have deaf children (to be part of the deaf community) through embryo selection might use similar technologies to transhumanists, but doing so is pretty much the polar opposite of transhumanism.

That blog's a better scott-post than most of recent ACX tbh

It was the post that ultimately brought me in this sphere to begin with.

Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans.

This is my view as well. I'm often accused of being conservative but there's something beautifully utopian about people just being who they want to be. It's a little messy today, but if technology were absolutely perfect and low-cost, who wouldn't try switching genders for a couple hours?

but if technology were absolutely perfect and low-cost

It'd lead to a lot of craziness I think. Have you been to twitter when people start switching profile pictures to women and then report 4x faster growth in followers, etc ?

Unless gender dysphoria were truly universal of which I'm doubtful a bit*, a lot of ambitious people would just switch because it's mostly men who matter (more drive than women, work harder and more singleminded, so overrepresented in important roles), and attractive women are something like a exploit against men. Most men are flattered and pay attention if a woman hits on them, and they try to impress, thus they're vulnerable.

Only weirdoes get defensive and start clutching their wallet because they correctly percieve this is against the natural order of things hence suspicious.

*unless it's something like an actual mismatch between brain's image of the body and body parts. I suspect dysphoria is more like having very strong feelings about what body parts you have and don't have. I'm okay being male, if I somehow woke up female tomorrow and not missing much of my strength or size, I'd really not mind at all, I think. Especially if we were in the future where biological clock were less pressing.

Wow. Talk about assuming their conclusions. That article is miserable, partly for the reasons you note, partly for the wild lack of charity, but also because of its determination to concentrate all agency in the hands of nebulous elites. In doing so, they ignore the single most important link between transgenderism and liberalism.

There exists some small fraction of the population which feels dysphoria. They can’t prove such an internal phenomenon, and it’s quite hard for those of us who don’t feel anything similar to empathize. Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.

This leads to obvious criticisms! Chesterton’s fence, externalities, false positives, and so on. I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires. It just skips over any actual reasoning to argue that a potential to benefit the wealthy poisons the whole concept.

It’s particularly bizarre to see reproductive medical technology branded as the transhumanist devil. One wonders if the author has experienced our current peak of assistive reproduction, the C-section.

Then again, I’m pretty broadly transhumanist, in the aspirational sense. We aren’t there, yet, but some day, I can only hope that humans can shed our features like an old coat. Couple that philosophy with trans people’s self-described feelings about gender, and I started to find it much easier to cooperate.

Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.

"Dismantling the gender binary" is not a personal voyage of discovery, but a broad social program including significant changes to governmental policy at all levels, fairly substantial changes in pedagogy, dissolution of parental authority over their children's upbringing, development and deployment of unproven hormonal interventions, the redefinition and hijacking of ordinary language, willful deception regarding scientific research and suppression of contradictory findings, and coordinated harassment campaigns against dissenters in anything from dating (the "cotton ceiling") to workplaces and academia. It is not as simple as "live and let live."

I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires.

Insofar as the "cabal of. . .billionaires" is either responsible for the intellectual development of a concept, coverage of that is basic bog-standard pop-intellectual history. Insofar as the cabal is providing a network of organizational and monetary support for activists, then that's worthwhile reportage just like pieces on the Koch or Soros networks, or "Big Tobacco's" involvement in quashing cancer research.

Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.

Is this hypothetical "real Liberalism" or "actual liberalism we're dealing with in real life"? Cause I can see how ideological liberalism may say that. But not how the one in our world actually does. The one in our world has taken the stance - as of now, it is being rolled back in some places - is basically that the liberal state throws its immense power into coercing all of the rest of us into abandoning the gender binary.

In fact, if anything, what separates the trans movement from the transhumanist movement is that Ray Kurzeweil-disciples can't actually compel you to validate their ideology right now. That's where trans has all of the worst elements of too-early transhumanism combined with the endless moral busy-bodying of rights discourse.

Arguably it is a perverse outcome due to trans being early: if transhumanism actually was viable, there would be no need for this sort of coercion and tyranny in order to be "validated". We don't have heated debates about "validating" that people with cochlear implants can hear.

I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them

To be fair: this is a substack that has a clear and strong stance on the issue and has basically already laid out its canonical counter-arguments so I think part of it is just not retreading old ground for the choir.

Even in the trans-human future trans people would still be personality and interest wise more like their birth sex than what they transitioned into. Unless we are also changing our brains now. That is the biggest lie of the transgender movement, that trans people are psychologically more like their preferred gender on psychometric traits than their biological sex. Programmer socks are a meme for a reason.

Or, why not just preemptively use our magical transhuman technology to erase the existence of people who are transgender.

real or actual

A little of both. I think we move the ratchet as we grow in capability. Catholic/Protestant tolerance was an existential threat in 1600; by 1800 it is plausible, and by 2000 it’s normalized in the West. Debating sex changes and related culture was completely useless in the Industrial Revolution. I’d say it’s in the second stage right now.

Cthulhu's swim is powered by technological surplus. If we keep accruing more, we will grow closer to the liberal ideal.

cochlear implants

I’m told this is actually a point of contention among the deaf! Partly generational, but those without implants sometimes view them as breaking solidarity, cultural erasure, etc. The full oppression stack that you’d see for more salient issues. Deafness is “settled” enough, in the mainstream, that there’s no political capital in the tribal lines, so we don’t get the same framework of allies and validation built on top.

I’m told this is actually a point of contention among the deaf!

That's its value: as a contrast. A "marginalized group" complained about being erased and most people don't care - hell, even know about the debate! There's no outrage, no drama in the mainstream. From a naive perspective - if we're just gonna be culture-warring over medical interventions - you'd think the older, already organized, objectively easier to define contingent of deaf people could have some say. But it's never been a live issue.

Meanwhile: the President is weighing in on "gender affirming healthcare" (puberty blockers, mastectomies and hormones) and we can't stop hearing about the on-trans violence because being a sexual deviant/sex worker in Brazil is dangerous.

Oh, I read that a different way.

People got used to making accommodations for the deaf. Subtitles and transcripts. I’d expect most Americans know of ASL, and dismiss it as a fun curiosity, rather than because it’s an imposition. This is despite that fact that it gets taught in schools and pandered in media!

The deaf have already won. They have an obvious disability, and our culture shifted to accommodate it, despite the costs. Something similar goes for the blind and the wheelchair-bound. It wasn’t without a fight, either: this was absolutely one of the culture wars.

Trans people don’t trigger the same flags, and the social and medical costs of accommodation are higher. That’s why I expect acceptance to improve with technology.

This is a different fight though. There was no question as to whether the deaf could actually hear or whether the best way to help them was to increase accessibility for people who cannot hear. These are not givens for the modern debate over gender.

It wasn’t without a fight, either: this was absolutely one of the culture wars.

Accommodations for people with disabilities are not nearly as divisive as trans issues. Divisiveness is a key feature for something to be part of the "culture war", according to my interpretation of the term at least.

But it was! Down to the sweeping gestures in DC.

Before that there were legal battles over involuntary confinement and forced sterilizations. People were joining all sorts of inappropriately named (by today's standards) activist groups.

Or to go further back, Helen Keller is a household name. I don't think most Americans could name a trans activist.

Hellen Keller is remembered more as a deaf person than a deaf activist though. Most Americans probably couldn't name Anne Sullivan, the corresponding non-deaf activist. And if you ask Americans to just name a trans person, they'll probably know Caitlin Jenner.

Is this hypothetical "real Liberalism" or "actual liberalism we're dealing with in real life"?

The latter is termed progressivism, not liberalism.

Chesterton’s fence, externalities, false positives, and so on.

You forgot the most obvious one: demanding that the rest of us go along with their claims, i.e. compelled speech. All other objections rely on values other than liberalism.

One wonders if the author has experienced our current peak of assistive reproduction, the C-section.

I would say that the baby with 3 parents is a more advanced technology, but that would make this jab meaningless and void.

True enough. I was bundling it under externalities, but it’s really the sine qua non for liberalism.

So really, is the only sin of “transpeople” being early?

I wonder this myself sometimes. For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them. And you can lose your job if you don’t. If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.

Of course, none of this applies to children transitioning. The number of people doing irreversible damage to their bodies without knowing the true risks based on social pressure has exploded, and I don’t want to get too into it because others already have done it much better here. I don’t think it’s a good thing nor do I want it to continue.

And then the natural question is, does tolerating the first thing lead to the second? It seems like it to me. In its current state trans ideology seems to allow for no opinion besides a maximalist one. And despite their small numbers, as an influence group they are incredibly influential in tech and online discourse due to the demographics of most people who transition to women tending to be people who are very online and in tech. See the deplatformings of the Kiwi Farms spearheaded by several trans activists for a recent example.

So futurist medical procedures would sidestep a big issue of mine with transgenderism, but it is far from the only one.

Quick edit: I forgot to mention the people that will want to be considered their chosen gender without doing the work to physically pass, which is a thing now and will most likely still be even in this hypothetical future. The question of how we respond to those people is important. Is it, yes you are your chosen gender? Or will we say l: I’ll call you a woman once you don’t have to tell me you’re one. I’d be okay with the latter option, not the former, but I can’t see it going that way culturally.

If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.

For some. I think there are probably 95% of trans people who just want to transition and be treated as the sex they identify with, and don't want to rock any boats.

But there's the 1-5% who are narcissistic attention-seekers and want to be both "I'm trans, I'm special, I demand you validate me" and "how dare you notice I'm trans, I'm a real woman, you should be punished!" They are the ones who make a fetish of it. Demand that lesbians have sex with them because "a female penis is not the same as a male penis". Range from the mildly creepy to the psycho.

If they got perfect magical SF transition, it wouldn't suit them because that would be too normal and boring, how could they stand out and demand attention and special treatment?

Demand that lesbians have sex with them because "a female penis is not the same as a male penis".

Of course, lesbians see nothing wrong with demanding access to the output of the penis (ie, sperm) without having deal with the penis itself or the person attached to it. I have trouble bringing myself to care that they are being criticized for not wanting sex with trans women with penises while feeling entitled to subsidized procreation without sex with people with penises.

For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them.

What's your stance on hirsutism? Does a woman with a beard count as not a woman? less of a woman?

I understand the idea of defining a woman as an "adult human female", but using looks as your metric makes me curious.

That one is interesting, because Wikipedia is claiming it affects "5-15% of women of all ethnic backgrounds," which is less than the number of women I've seen with facial hair. I'm guessing it's fairly easily managed with a razor, and in any case facial hair is far from the only physical tell of sex, so that doesn't seem to pose an issue to what I'm saying.

To be more charitable we can go with whatever rare genetic condition may cause a woman to appear extremely mannish. In which case I would probably assume she is male unless corrected. That would be very unfortunate and I feel sympathy for her having to go around life that way, but she is by definition a rare genetic outlier. We can openly say that this is not the way it normally biologically works and don't feel the need to collapse biological gender categories over it.

If it was a political issue where people were identifying with this disorder or trying to medically induce it, demanding at risk of job loss you accept it, trying to normalize and give it to children, etc. and this was all surging at once within the last 10 years? At that point it leaves the category of weird genetic outlier and I start to ask what's going on here.

For me personally (not the person you are replying to), I don't define a woman by looks, but looks are a heuristic. It's obviously unacceptable to go "ok, let's see if you have a penis or a vagina in those pants", so you make an inference based on the overall appearance.

Ironically, I can envision a scenario where the trans movement will have made things harder for people you mention, such as a woman who has a beard. At no point would such a woman have been considered normal and unremarkable (see: every circus with a "bearded lady" exhibit), but I think time was that nobody would've questioned if they were actually women. If you saw a really butch looking woman one may have assumed she was a man, but when corrected one would accept that she's a woman.

Now, though, I can envision that same scenario happening but with people refusing to accept the woman as actually being a woman. Because from their point of view there are lots of people falsely labeling men as women, so now it's not as simple as "she says she's a woman, then she is". Now that person probably has to resort to using looks, and being suspicious of anyone who doesn't appear to be a woman but claims to be one.

I don't actually know if this is happening, so this isn't really meant to be an argument against the trans movement. But it seems very plausible to me, and I can't help but wonder if there have been unintended consequences in a vein like I describe.

I don't actually know if this is happening

From 2016: Connecticut woman says she was harassed in Walmart bathroom after customer mistook her as transgender (archive link because the website is unavailable in the EU). However, it seems in this case there is no evidence beyond the woman's claim.

Also from 2016, this time with a video of the incident: Man follows woman into restroom after mistaking her for a man (archived). This was apparently a simple misunderstanding that was resolved amicably.

While searching, I also found this article from 2008 (!): Woman mistaken for a man settles NY lawsuit.

This Twitter thread discusses another example.

So it does seem to happen. And I would assume that not every such incident makes the news.

But blaming trans people for this is ridiculous. How is it their fault that people prejudiced against them sometimes accidentally target insufficiently feminine-looking cis women? In fact, I've always considered these false-positive incidents a strong argument in favour of letting trans people use the toilet corresponding to their identified gender.

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