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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 don't think this is truly people's objection, whatever else they may say.
I think there are a ton of cases where a fuzzy boundary, usually corresponding to some biological reality, gets bridged with an honorary status. Whether it is adoption of children creating honorary blood relations, or conversion to ethnoreligions like the ex-Muslim Vaishnavite convert Haridasa Thakur or the Biblical Ruth's adoption of Jewish customs and ways.
I think the "adoption" model (which I've sometimes called the "socio-legal sex" model) of trans people is the closest to being an accurate statement of the reality of trans people, and it has the advantage of not requiring any dubious metaphysics. A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child. Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality - they are intersubjective facts about human social relationships and (potentially) associated legal structures
There is no lie in saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son" any more than there is a lie in saying "The United States has 50 states" or any number of other intersubjective human-created "truths." Of course, with these kinds of truths, there will always be room for rivalrous claims. If I say, "There is no King of England", then depending on what I mean by that, I could be saying a perfectly "true" fact. (For example, if I was an anarchist, and didn't regard any monarchical claim as valid.)
I mean, I don't really object to other people making whatever honourary or even dubious claims make them happy, including you -- the current state of trans-affairs is more like your anarchist going around getting people fired for considering themselves subjects of the King. Or monarchists forcing the anarchists to pledge fealty every morning before work; also bad.
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Claiming someone is "adopted" is a falsifiable claim about an event that occurred in reality. Unless your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "adoption", the so-called "fuzzy boundary" of what constitutes adoption is beyond the horizon of normal parlance.
Claiming someone is "a woman" has been, for the overwhelming majority of the term's historical usage, a falsifiable claim about someone's sex. Unless your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "a woman", the so-called "fuzzy boundary" of what constitutes a woman has previously been beyond the horizon of normal parlance.
In both cases, the obvious evidence that these words mean something closely reflecting reality is that mislabeling someone is somewhere between a joke and an insult. The accidental category error is so uncommon that deliberate category error is a meaningful signal in communication.
The transgender memeplex wants to expand the usage of the word "woman" to include unfalsifiable claims about someone's internal mental state. If your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "a woman", your job is now by definition completely arbitrary: how is it possible to draw the distinction, other than to fully accept or deny the dubious metaphysics that allows anyone to be anything in their imagination? For all other parlance, the meaning of "woman" is now decoupled from centuries of ordinary usage - this is less of a "fuzzy boundary" creeping in, and more a total erasure of the fundamental falsifiable claim at the heart of the word. In spite of all this, the transgender memeplex expects to inherit both the insult of mislabeling (without also inheriting the objective distinctions that made this mislabeling insulting in the first place) and the legal and social statuses and carve-outs for whichever sex is most convenient to their whims.
There's a clear, obvious distinction between the usage of words that make concrete claims about reality (but for a handful of exotic edge cases no one ever thinks about), and the usage of words in the transgender memeplex that erodes centuries of colloquial understanding in favor of obfuscating, homogenizing, and booby-trapping the terminology with definitions based on unfalsifiable internal mental states. I wouldn't call the latter "lying" per se, but I don't blame the average Joe for pattern matching demands for uncritical acceptance of unfalsifiable claims that overwrite common sense to something very close to "lying", particularly when these demands are brazenly accompanied by power grabs and political maneuvering. Motives aside, I think a lot of people instinctively consider anyone deploying this kind of rhetorical trickery to be either crazy or up to no good, and deny it legitimacy by refusing to participate.
I think that the terminology problem that arises here is the difference between social truths and mind-independent truths about reality.
If I was speaking colloquially, I would allow social truths to be called "objective" in some sense. But I think there is a difference between a sentence like "The speed limit here is 75 miles per hour", and "The sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium." The first is referring to an intersubjective agreement about a rule in society, and the second is a fact that even Martians could discover about the universe.
In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independeng facts about reality (objective.)
I think these sentences are mind-independent truths:
But they are completely compatible with the social truths:
I agree that social truths lend themselves to falsification. If I make a move in chess, it is either legal or it is not. But chess is not a mind-independent part of the universe that a Martian scientist could just discover "out there." It exists as a set of intersubjective agreements between humans, who agree to abide by the rules of chess.
So too, every society decides the rules by which they judge the validity of adoption and honorary sex transition. The Islamic world rejects the concept of "adoption", replacing it with a legal construct of "guardianship" with different implications for inheritance, for example. "Adoption" is not a legal move in the game of Islamic jurisprudence.
Right now, honorary sex transition is in a state of flux - finding acceptance among some in the Western world, and rejection among others. People are playing different games, and may or may not converge on a single game some day.
Right, because in most everyday conversation, we don't need to. The mind-independent facts about "adoption" and "women" have historically been well-correlated with the usage of the words in subjective or intersubjective contexts, independent of the society in question.
Islam has a different intersubjective analogue ("guardianship") for something that correlates with the same mind-independent facts about "adoption". No one considers this "lying", it's just different societal rules for the same fact pattern.
The transgender memeplex attempts to redefine the meaning of the intersubjective "woman" in a way that completely divorces the terms from the existing correlation with the objective "woman". Is this lying? No, it's just changing the rules about using one of the most common words in everyday parlance to render it objectively meaningless, such that it's indistinguishable from lying to anyone using the old intersubjective rules; while also expecting everyone to honor the inherited intersubjective rules about mislabeling, special interests, etc. that only exist because of the now-deprecated objective meaning; except now those inherited intersubjective rules should apply to subjective, unobservable mind states we can all change on a whim.
Again, while I don't think the average person will put it in those terms, they can probably notice the "lie by the old rules" part and the political maneuvering one step behind it, conclude that this is a scam, and refuse to engage.
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By this reasoning you should accept transracial people.
Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time. Light brown-skinned Hispanic people are increasingly identifying as just "white" in the United States and their voting behavior is becoming more correlated with assimilated white Americans, for example. There's a long history of things like blanqueamiento in the Latin American world.
I think there are a few basic levels of intersubjective truth claims:
Trans people might arguably be at the level of Tier 2 - if one is willing to talk about "progressives" as a tribe. So far as I know, transracial people in the Rachel Dolezal style are still at Tier 1. These tiers aren't about making a thing "more true" - since I think social "truths" like "dollars have value", "The United States exists", or "So-and-so is the true king" are all operating more at the level of fiction. If you want to be nitpicky, I think they could all be called false in a strict sense, in the same way that saying something like, "Harry Potter is a wizard" is false - there is no such person as Harry Potter, and no such thing as wizards. But everyone who knows how to speak and use words also knows that "Harry Potter is a wizard" is a more felicitous sentence than "Harry Potter is a fire-breathing dragon."
We're talking about anyone being able to arbitrarily choose their race at any given moment, though.
From a "race is a social construct" perspective, isn't this just code switching? Presumably scoped here to people who ambiguously pass as either.
Do I get Affirmative Action benefits, if I code switch?
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I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment, any more than I've endorsed the view that you can just adopt an orphaned child at any given moment. I think in most cases and with most social groups, honorary statuses will require some kind of "social proof" for a group to accept them. In the case of adoption, it might look like filling out a bunch of forms with the government. In the case of trans people, it might look like paying $50 at your DMV to get your sex indicators changed on your driver's license.
The "social proof" doesn't have to involve the government, though that is usually the "easiest" path since it means that the people with the ability to enforce contracts through their monopoly on force recognize your claim as legitimate. However, if a national disaster created a 10 year state of anarchy, I think people in a community that already believed in the basic legitimacy of child adoption could have informal adoption with enough social proof that most of the people in a community recognized the validity of the claim.
But it very clearly is the view that is being pushed throughout societies. There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency. It's all fine and well that you might not support it, but you can't act like you're steelmanning a view, when that's clearly not the view being put forward.
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