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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38414 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?

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.

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