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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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