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 -
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Yeah. "Girlish" traits like frivolity, stupidity/incapability, and artsiness are valued among AGP folks because it turns them on. Whacking it to not being able to do math is a common AGP pastime. There's an element of roleplay going on that is impossible to dissociate from the chemical element without double blind studies.
Also, "Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life." - yeah, making major life changes, having a new project, and potentially a new social group, can do that for you.
How do you know that?
Pretty common is an overstatement, but it's a behavior I've seen around AGP/sissy spaces. I used to be AGP. Not all trans people are AGP, but it seems that a greater portion of AGP people are going trans nowadays than back when I was into it.
In the broad sense, getting turned on by behavior the person associates with feminity is the most common and defining AGP behavior, and that is not rare at all. The trans redditors call it "gender euphoria" nowadays, to avoid calling it a paraphilia.
Yeah, but that's both because nobody knows what a paraphilia is[1], and because it sounds like that other '-philia' that means you're into kids.
(Actually, the same's true of using the expanded form of 'AGP', for the same reason, and those who use it know that.)
[1] I mean, I like that caliber and being prepared and all, but I've yet to develop a sexual attraction to bullets and MREs.
It's curious that sex-positivity means that you can openly declare yourself kink-friendly, and yet in common parlance the suffix "-philia" is only ever used to refer to creepy things which even proudly kinky people would not want getting out about them if they had them (paedophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia, ephebophilia, zoophilia). Maybe it's just because Greek words sound clinical, like you're a specimen being studied under a microscope? Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.
((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))
But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.
To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.
That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.
But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.
Well, I can't imagine any way that could possibly be abused.
In fairness, I don't remember ever personally encountering any trans women who didn't fall into one of these categories or the other. I'm sure there must be a handful, but based on my own personal experience it wouldn't be unreasonable to round it off to these two categories (increasingly heavily weighted towards the latter).
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
More options
Context Copy link