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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.
Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly. Behaviours which would rise to the level of "red flag for violent or threatening behaviour" if committed by a male person will not result in a batted eyelid if committed by a female person. You can say "we've redrawn the category boundaries such that the word 'woman' now includes certain male people (with all the propensity for violence that that implies): adjust your expectations accordingly, and it's not our fault if you erroneously assumed that this person referred to as 'she' was female and didn't think she posed a threat as a result". But let's be real: 90% of people (99% of non-extremely online people) hear "she" and think "female person", and assume that said person is exactly as prone to committing an act of violence as any other female person (which is to say, not very). Even if the person is familiar with the tenets of gender ideology and knows that the category "woman" includes some tiny proportion of male people, they will assume that any person referred to as "she" is a female person unless they have good reason to believe otherwise. The fact that one tiny corner of human society has redrawn category boundaries in order to use the word "woman" in a nonstandard way doesn't change the expectations 90% of people have about people who are referred to using the pronoun "she", and no one is more aware of this than bad actors looking to get away with bad behaviour.
If an article about the Zizians includes a photo of LaSota, it will be obvious that LaSota is male, and people will update their expectations about LaSota's behaviour, threat level and risk calculus accordingly. But many articles about the Zizians do not include any photos of LaSota (I only found out what they looked like earlier this week). Likewise people talking about the story on the radio or on podcasts. So an article which says "LaSota says that she thinks so-and-so... she was last seen crossing the border into Mexico on [date]" will be interpreted by a significant proportion of its readerbase as an article about an uncontroversially female person who poses no more threat than any other uncontroversially female person. Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man. (Never mind native Anglophones who are unfamiliar with the finer points of gender ideology; what about non-native English speakers to whom the term "trans woman" means nothing?) If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.
Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.
Please use more paragraph breaks, it was a challenge to make my way through this.
I have hope that this will sort itself out through better education and general osmosis at about the same rate that the "use a trans person's preferred pronouns" social norm will spread. In the meantime, if we think it's relevant, I'm fine with saying "LaSota, born male…", calling her "biologically male", or whatever.
Okay, but... I don't think über-progressive journalists are actually fully cognizant of that fact. The 'people may interpet trans woman backwards' thing, in particularly, is so deeply at odds with progressive vernacular that it genuinely doesn't register. I'm aware of it intellectually, which is more than most, but still hadn't thought of it in relation to this question until you brought it up! 'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.
Above all else, though:
This is where you lose me from the start. The premise fundamentally repels me. I cannot and will not subscribe to this rad-fem-descended idea that being a biological male is some sort of dreadful disease so potentially dangerous to bystanders that you inherently harm them by keeping your maleness from them. Men aren't fucking werewolves. I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.
Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines. "This person is a man" isn't some all-important piece of information that the public absolutely must know about some weird cult-leader who escaped to Mexico. No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.
Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes. Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges? (You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?
To me, complaining about the potential ambiguity of 'she/her'-ing Ziz LaSota isn't like taking Clinton to task for being a smartass about the meaning of "sexual relations". It'd be like taking him to task for off-handedly mentioning he used to play "football" in the same public address without clarifying that he meant soccer and not American football. Yeah sure a lot of listeners might get the wrong idea, so what.
I'll note that the goalposts seemed to shift very quickly from "the way journalists are phrasing this isn't obscuring the facts" to "okay, the way journalists are phrasing this is obscuring the facts, but it came from a place of ignorance rather than from a conscious intention to mislead their readers".
I disagree, however: I think trans activists and progressive journalists know exactly how unpopular their preferred policies are with the general public, and are fully aware that they can only get them into legislation under cover of darkness. This explains their annoying habit of labelling their opponents as "transphobic", "TERF" etc. without explicitly stating what their opponents' opinions are.
The fact that there's so much overlap between the grievances aired by "trans women" and the grievances aired by sophomoric MRAs is further evidence for my conclusion that I'm looking at the same picture.
What? Are you seriously arguing that only the strongest men are more muscular than women, on average?
I agree, Ziz's transness is not relevant to their crimes (except insofar as having their delusions reinforced and encouraged by all and sundry in their vicinity may have contributed to their cultish megalomania). The fact that Ziz is male is relevant to their crimes, given male people's greater propensity and capability for violence.
On the contrary - I think there are a great many people who think (not unreasonably, given the massive strength differentials between the sexes) that if they were threatened by a female escaped murderer, they would be capable of subduing her with relative ease. Thus, referring to Ziz using language which strongly implies that they are female is misleading and not in the public interest.
There's also the very real possibility that, depending on the jurisdiction, Ziz will be recorded as a female murderer and cult leader, as is already policy in many parts of the West. This will obviously hamper criminologists' ability to understand crime offending patterns in the future, if the data is contaminated by the presence of male offenders in the female dataset. Claim that you aren't in favour of that all you want - it's the logical endpoint of the worldview you're espousing.
"Fractionally", "vaguely correlated", as if we're just talking about 105 male murderers for every 100 female. Meanwhile, back in Planet Reality, male people are responsible for just shy of 90% of murders in the US. Most men are not murderers, but most murderers are men. Trans activists (including the minority on this very website) sometimes like to act like they're so noble and heroic like "why on earth would I care about the genitals of a stranger?", thereby implying that anyone who expresses any desire to know about a stranger's sex is some kind of pervert (because they themselves are so pornsick that they can't conceive of wanting to know this information for reasons other than sexual gratification). Actually, it's perfectly simple: if a woman is walking home alone and she notices a stranger walking a hundred yards behind her, if she knows that that stranger is male (regardless of how they "identify", because violent crime rates track sex and not gender identity), she thereby knows, right off the bat, that the stranger in question is 9 times more likely to murder her than if the stranger is female. This is extremely useful information for a woman to have to carry out her risk calculus - but women making generalisations about male people hurts your feelings, so you think a murderer and cult leader's sex is none of the public's business. Okay.
As @zackmdavis argues, The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions. We have a category called "man" and a category called "woman". Before gender ideology was a thing, we knew that the members of the category "man" were vastly more likely to commit violence than members of the category "woman". Then someone invented gender ideology and argued that some of the people who would have once been included in the category "man" ought really to have been included in the category "woman". We investigated this, and determined that there was no difference in propensity to commit violence when comparing "men" with the minority of people who would traditionally have been categorised as "men" but now wanted to be categorised as "women" (and the members of the latter group were exactly as strong as any other person who would traditionally have been categorised as a man). So, from the narrow perspective of "violence-avoiding risk calculus", isn't it just abundantly obvious that the "new" definitions are just worse at this goal than the old definitions? Isn't it obvious we've substituted a fairly accurate and extremely intuitive categorisation system for a vastly less accurate and vastly less intuitive one? Isn't this just obviously bad?
I wasn't complaining about journalists failing to mention certain traits of Ziz's which would make them more prone to criminality. If journalists published articles about the Zizians which used they/them or ze or xe etc. for every named individual, that'd be one thing. I'm complaining about journalists using language which directly implies that the individual in question is a member of a different group which has an extremely low propensity and capability for violence, when the individual in question is not a member of that group, but is rather a member of a group which has a vastly higher propensity and capability for violence.
To return to your example: supposing I was arrested for a crime, and some journalist published an article which contained the sentence "FtttG was a frequent poster on the website The Motte". In our counterfactual universe, themotte dot ORG is an extremely obscure website, whereas there's a much more popular website called themotte dot COM which is very pro-trans. If a journalist included this sentence in their article without disambiguating the domain name, wouldn't you think that most readers would assume the journalist was referring to themotte.com? Wouldn't you think the journalist probably knew how the sentence would be taken by most of their readers, and included it anyway? I don't really see much difference between
I just don't agree that predicting violence is the main point of the man/woman binary. I guess this is Scott's Thrive/Survive dichotomy in action: I'm trying to identify the optimal social norms for generally pro-social law-abiding people to adopt among themselves to ensure their mutual happiness and fulfillment - you're trying to design the social structures that best minimize risk in a cutthroat world where you're always calculating the chance that a stranger in the street wants to gut you like a fish. I'm asking what's nicer, you're asking what's safer.
Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder. But when we're talking about principles rather than making policy, I think you need to set your sights on the ideal world, not on the making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation compromises. First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right. That's what it means for me to be a Progressive.
It just seems to me that you're transparently elevating one group's concerns and preferences over another. You seem to be essentially saying "it is so important that trans women feel safe and happy and 'affirmed', that I'm perfectly willing to deny women useful information that would help them to navigate an unsafe world. In fact, trans women feeling safe and 'affirmed' is so important to me that I have no problem if the policies I enact in pursuit of that goal carry the unavoidable side effect of enabling bad actors to effectively hide in plain sight."
I mean, I've long suspected that certain trans activists literally thought that trans women's emotional comfort was more important than female people's physical safety: I'm kind of surprised that you more or less came right out and said so.
To me, it sounds like "how many trans women per 100k population killed themselves as a result of being persistently 'misgendered'" vs. "how many female people per 100k population were attacked, raped and/or murdered by male strangers" are empirical questions which shouldn't be that difficult to answer. We might well look at the facts on the ground and decide trans women's emotional comfort comes at such a high price that the juice simply isn't worth the squeeze. Or we might not! But systematically elevating the emotional comfort of one demographic over the physical safety of another demographic is not, in my view, compatible with a pluralistic democracy.
As long as you and I are both alive, male people will be far more aggressive and prone to murder and sexual assault than female people (along with being more prone to crime in general, although the delta isn't nearly as large as it is when we limit our analysis to violent crimes). The murder rate might plummet to a fraction of its current level, but male people will always commit the vast majority of murders. Likewise for assault and rape. As long as this is the case (which it will be forever), male bad actors will always have something to gain by passing themselves off as female if the option is open to them. Thus if your radical self-ID policy is controversial in this time and place, there's good reason to believe that it always will be.
I think I have a much higher probability than you of some sort of singularity in the future. Not necessarily in the near future, not necessarily in the exact form current A.I. gurus talk about - but somewhere between now and the year 3000, yeah, I do think technology will hopefully have improved humans' daily lives very, very radically. I very much anticipate a world where the murder rate plummets to literally zero thanks to automated surveillance, where most people spend their time in V.R. so that the very idea of harping on about what our flesh bodies look like at birth becomes quaint and irrelevant, etc. Quite possibly not in our lifetimes - but eventually. When I consider the moral law, I am asking what principles will make sense to these people of tomorrow, as much as anything. When they look back on our tragic and barbaric times, these people, I want to be remembered as one of those who were clear-headed enough to acknowledge the rights that will be self-evident to them, even when it was costly, even impractical to do so; to be like those rare Ancient Greeks and Romans who spoke out against slavery, even if they had no particular concept of how their empires' economies could have been sustained without it. Again, read Scott's post.
I have read Scott's post several times.
Of course, post-Singularity, all of these petty squabbles about sex, gender, crime, safeguarding etc. will be completely irrelevant.
But, you know, the Singularity hasn't actually happened yet, if you haven't noticed. I find it deeply strange that you're trying to enact policies which would make the world better in a post-Singularity world, while fully cognizant of the fact that they make our pre-Singularity world demonstrably worse, and that the Singularity is unlikely to happen in your lifetime. It's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that they'll win the lottery tomorrow. Actually, it's worse than that - it's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that their great-great-grandson will win the lottery long after they're dead. Even if you knew for a fact that your great-great-grandson would win the lottery long after you're dead, shouldn't you plan your finances a bit more sensibly while you're still alive?
Why do debates with trans activists invariably devolve into nonsensical circular reasoning ("a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", "a woman is a person who experiences misogynistic sexism"), bizarre outré navel-gazing about our transhumanist future, or both? "In the future we'll be able to implant uteri in trans women's bellies and they'll be functionally indistinguishable from female people in every way that counts - therefore we should treat trans women as women now." (paraphrased) And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike! What on earth could this far-off hypothetical scenario possibly have to do with the world in which we currently live, in which nothing resembling a Singularity seems likely to happen and in which no trans woman will ever bear a child in either of our lifetimes?
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