This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement. The basis of liberalism (real liberalism, not the recent US perversion of the word) is "you do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt me; I do what I want as long as it doesn't hurt you". All of the first five things fall under "you do what you want"; the last one is denying "I do what I want".
If you think liberalism is insane, well, okay, glad we understand each other. If you think it's in the minority, eh, you're probably right, which is sad, but it's hardly "only a few contrarians".
...I do also have a point to make which is kind of awkward, because I find the entire form of the argument to be invalid and ordinarily assiduously avoid making it, but which might be somewhat more compelling to you.
Specifically, autism.
See, the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide. Here's the problem: autistics are often psychologically damaged by being forced to say things they think are "wrong", including invalid additions to closed-class words like pronouns, and obviously simple falsehoods. I'm not saying I never lie, but we're talking literally three times in the last fifteen years, and on all three occasions I literally had cause to believe someone could be murdered if I didn't tell the lie. And I remember the effort knocking me around badly on at least one of those occasions - another knocked me around badly in general, as you might expect from a life-and-death situation, but I'm a bit hazy on how much the lie contributed. I am fairly certain that my mental health would go down the toilet if I were forced to do this on a regular basis; the last time I had to suppress my nature (although in a slightly-different way) in the long-term, I literally wound up attacking my mother with a duvet while stark naked (and the split personality took about a decade to fully wither).
So. Now we're at an impasse; the exact rationale for enforcing pronouns also demands that we don't enforce pronouns. I don't see any consistent rule that allows ignoring the autistic problem but not the trans problem; autism is at least as much of an immutable characteristic (NB: I'm ex-trans myself), autistic mental health outcomes also suck horribly, and prevalence rates are similar. SJ prioritises one over the other, but as far as I can tell that's just because at least since GamerGate SJ finds central examples of autists unsympathetic and doesn't care what happens to us.
As I said, I find this argument's entire form objectionable; I reject these sorts of arguments entirely, because they result in paradoxes like this one and more generally cause massive headaches for everyone. I don't ask for special accommodations for being autistic; yes, loud noise bothers the hell out of me, but I solve that with earmuffs rather than requiring others to remove the noise, because it's a me problem and not an everyone problem. But you seem to find these sorts of arguments a bit more compelling than I do, so I might as well point out the issue.
EDIT: Okay, one of the times I lied (and the time I clearly remember being a crying mess afterward), what I was afraid of would AIUI technically have been manslaughter, not murder. I don't think this has much relevance to the point at issue, though.
Not in my experience. Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.
It's not really my basic reasoning for this, FWIW.
But also, at an epistemological level, I simply don't grant that using a trans person's preferred pronouns constitutes "lying". Like I said elsewhere in this thread, it doesn't involve communicating any untrue belief about physical reality. When I say "this trans women is, socially, within the object-class for which we use the pronoun she" I am not telling you she has a uterus any more than I'd be telling you a sailing ship had a uterus if I told you "traditionally, seafaring vessels are referred to with the pronoun she". If calling a wooden floating object anything but an 'it' bothers you for the same reason, well, I'm sorry for you, but so it goes.
I would be interested to see if this was still the case if we had fully-reversible medical transitions.
I would be also interested to see if this was still the case if we had Clarketech-style indistinguishable-except-with-specialized-medical-tech medical transitions.
Here's hoping that I'll be able to see the answer to at least one of these questions within my lifetime...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link