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The Zizians as we probably know are a rationalist murder-cult, followers of Jack "Ziz" Lasota, a non-passing preop MtF transsexual, which is an identity shared by many of Jack's followers. Yudkowsky commented on it on X, and I noticed he used "she/her" pronouns for Jack.
This seems to be the dominant social norm in rationalist spaces. In my experience I have seen rationalist spaces completely capitulate to trans language norms, even using altered pronouns to refer to people who don't pass and exhibit male-coded bad faith behavior, like murder sprees.
I'm rationalist adjacent myself. I don't go out of my way to refuse to use someone's altered pronouns. I certainly have used chosen pronouns for people that pass and seem to engage the community in good faith. But I have a hard time adopting chosen pronouns as a rule. It seems to me that a social norm of always using altered pronouns weakens the defense against bad-faith actors. I've gotten comments deleted on rationalist message boards for correctly gendering various people in the news who seemed to me to be bad actors.
The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know. It seems important for the justice system. It helps explain his behavior. And it seems important for communities that are pattern-matching to filter future bad actors.
While I've spent a lot of time in rationalist spaces, I've also absorbed a bit of Gender Critical ideology. I used to have strong AGP urges, describing myself as a "lesbian in a man's body". But in my mid 30s I figured out that having an auto-erotic fantasy at the center of my sex life was isolating and would keep me from having the kind of family life that I desired. I began to detox from TG pornography and erotica, treating it much as one would treat an addiction. Gender critical forums were helpful for puncturing the balloons of my fantasy and helping me understand how some could see my TG roleplaying as anti-social behavior.
Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.
I wonder if the rationalist default to fully embrace trans language norms reflects the fact that there aren't a lot of mothers and daughters in the rationalist space, while there are a lot of MtF transsexuals. Perhaps it is just easiest for a scene to adopt the norms which will cause the least social friction within the scene. There's not a lot of breast-feeding forums, girl's swim meets, or female dorms in the experience of people in the rationalist community where the presence of transwomen would create conflict.
But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle. Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?
There are. Hello! AMA! (I'm not trans myself, just very, very committed on this issue.)
It depends on what you mean by "bad actors" and "slippery slopes".
When you say "bad actors": are we talking about cis perverts pretending to be trans? About trans women pretending to be be cis women? About trans women who are genuinely trans, insofar as that means anything, but for whom it's more of a sex thing than they admit?
The liar in the breastfeeding story sounds like an example of a genuine bad actor of the second type. Lying bad. Hot take, I know. But that's just it: the problem with that behavior was the lying. The 'taking advantage's of people's sympathy on false pretenses'. The fact that the pervert was lying about biological sex is incidental. An infertile cis woman lying about having lost a child would be just as scandalous, to me. And more to the point, while I haven't been following the story very closely, I don't see what it has in common with the Zizians. They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here. Not that it matters.
And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime. Calling the moral brigade because someone somewhere might be having Dirty Thoughts about a woman is rightly derided as one of the worst excesses of a certain brand of feminism: this should apply here too. Yes, being perceived as a sexy woman is a sex thing for some trans women. (Not all of them; I know many trans women who are straight-up asexual. But a good number.) …So? Men aren't asked if they're foot fetishists before they're allowed on beaches where women go barefoot. Women who take men to task for the suspicion that the men are imagining them with their clothes off, even if the men in question don't make a single suggestive remark, are universally viewed as crazy puritans by anyone who doesn't share their neuroses. Let trans women jerk off about being trans women in the privacy of their own home, if they're not being indecent in public it's their own business. The mothers in the Facebook group chat have a perfectly valid grievance about being lied to, but whether the liar's motive was sexual or not in the privacy of their own mind, won't magically change the level of harm if the 'victims' couldn't tell at the time.
Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.
I'm aware, but, for a couple of reasons that isn't a position I have a lot of respect for; sorry if the following two-point reply is a bit on the curt side.
First, because it relies on a kind of obtuse definition of "lying" that breaks down completely as soon as you look at, for example, non-binary people. If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.
Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.
Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.
Yes?
None of the other stuff impacts me in the slightest; it's (aspirationally) a free country. "Demands to be addressed as she" is maybe the least sticky of the demands that are being made IRL, but it's still sticky enough.
Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom. No one is asking you to pretend that a single cell in that person's body is arranged differently than you believe it to be. Your beliefs about physical reality are perfectly aligned with the 'ze's. You have a disagreement about social norms but the trans person isn't asking you to lie about what you believe to be the ground-level truth. I brought up the non-binary thing because in the case of e.g. a trans woman, you can kinda sorta argue that you're being asked to act-as-though this person has a vagina, even if you're not being asked to believe that they really physically do. But a non-binary person? There's nothing there.
You can't fathom people believing that there is no such thing as a third gender? I don't know what to tell you; AMA I guess.
I can't fathom that people can only parse "Alice is non-binary" as "Alice belongs to an objectively real third gender that abstractly exists" (a falsifiable claim about the world, and thus, a lie if you don't think it's true) rather than "Alice identifies as non-binary" (an undeniable objective fact about Alice's behavior and therefore not a lie whether or not you think Alice ought to be non-binary).
I don't care what Alice identifies at -- I identify Alice as a woman or a man, and referring to him/her otherwise would be untrue.
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What if I don't believe in this novel conception of social norms?
What if I asked you to not use any gendered pronouns at all and to use "comrade" instead in every occurence? Would you not have any objection based on your own belief system?
Telling the truth is not limited to truths that pertain to material reality. As it happens.
Drawing your attention to my comment to @WandererintheWilderness here.
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Not really, no. I would find it cumbersome, and, as a result, I'd probably try and avoid having to talk about you at all. But if I absolutely had to write about you, particularly somewhere you or another comradegender person could see it, I'd honor your request.
Language is an adaptive compression and error-correction algorithm on concepts over a lossy channel, give or take.
And indeed there is a lot of overlap between English and an entropy code with a preshared dictionary. (Not perfect by any means - English is complicated!) Pick a number of output symbols, pack your common concepts into short combinations of output symbols and your less common concepts into longer combinations of output symbols, and go from there.
Every input symbol in an entropy encoding has an optimum length of output symbol(s) based on the input symbol probabilities. Pick an output that is longer, and the encoding will be less efficient on average. But also: pick an output that is shorter, and the encoding will be less efficient on average too! This is because making the output encoding for that particular symbol shorter requires making the output encodings for other symbol(s) longer in a way that results in a less efficient encoding overall.
English's error correction and detection is largely in the form of sentence structure and (commonly) using only a relatively small portion of the potential space of all spoken syllables (or letters, in the case of written text. For instance, you were able to reed this sentence regardless of my typo, due to 'reed' being far less likely to refer to the plant in context than to a mis-spelling of 'read').
English speakers tend to adapt their language to channel capacity too, using simpler and more distinct words and concepts when e.g. in the presence of high amounts of background noise. Ditto, English speakers have a tendency to have a reasonable grasp of 'unusual' words, and when one is encountered will often slow down, repeat, or otherwise be careful about saying it as a hint of 'yes, this is in fact what I meant to say, not an inadvertent error'. (The fact that this overlaps substantially with 'unusual words tend to be practiced less' is very helpful here!)
You even have adaptive encoding. Jargon is precisely noting that a concept comes up a lot and so assigning a shorter nickname to it in context. Ditto things like short nicknames and first names versus full names. Use the short form when it is unambiguous in context, and otherwise use the longer (but unambiguous) version. Even pronouns are themselves just shorter references to a particular person (or set of people) when it can be inferred from context as opposed to repeatedly stated.
Now let's come back to names.
If you demand you must be referred to by, oh, the word 'and'. What have you done?
Well, first off you've just decreed that the preshared dictionary for everyone be updated to include you as a definition for the word 'and'. This is a minor cost for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion. At least it is a one-time cost (...it is a one-time cost, right?)
Second, you've just made the handshake process more annoying for everyone. Quick: what happens when I talk to someone who has not heard that you are to now be referred to as 'and'? Answer: confusion & wasted time. This is at least a cost paid no more than once per person (hopefully).
Third, you've make the 'standard' use of the word 'and' marginally more ambiguous. Again, this hurts everyone for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion.
Fourth, you've just decreed people must memorize said moniker in order to refer to you. Trivial in this case; decidedly non-trivial in others. Again, this hurts everyone for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion.
Finally - recall the above discussion re: adaptive encoding. You've decreed that there is no acceptable longer version, and as such you occupy a non-trivial portion of the space of the entire English language. In practice what happens is people ignore this and come up with increasingly convoluted workarounds. Because at the end of the day: you're probably that important to yourself. You may be that important to your closest friends (if so, you have good friends). Beyond that? You - statistically speaking with regards to the preshared dictionary that is English - are not that important. Or, more to the point: not everyone can be that important.
The same sort of thing occurs when a word has overlap with a concept that is used more frequently than your name.
And an analogous sort of thing even occurs when you pick a word that does not exist. Again: Shannon capacity. Adding a symbol does not magically break the channel capacity bound. It just makes the transmission slower, and communication overall - assuming that you are not used in context as often as the symbol length would imply - slower.
So, all of the above being said, if you're still pushing to change your moniker, what can you do?
...and in the context of "use "comrade" instead in every occurrence [of a gendered pronoun]" (@IGI-111):
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In total honesty, I find tolerating that imposition incomprehensible.
Must be a cultural thing.
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