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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people?

You could ask the same of many "terminally online" types of people.

They don't want you to hate them. But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.

Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground?

Ideally, predictive power.

The original paper on the autism-schizotypy spectrum that was cited in the blogpost didn't actually have anything to do with gender. The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction. All other differences in cognitive and personality traits were taken to be downstream of that criteria.

This could be cashed out in terms of predictions about e.g. how subjects will perform on tasks related to attention and context-switching, and how those results will be correlated with personality traits.

But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.

I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".

This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.

That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":

  • Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
  • Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
  • Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
  • Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
  • Decreased sensory sensitivity.
  • Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
  • Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.

"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.

The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction.

Im sceptical of this because for me this differs a lot between different kinds of sensations. E.g. I can never "forget that youre wearing it", whatever "it" is, but it takes effort to not tune out music in under a minute, even if Im not doing anything else.

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