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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I am trying to understand the standard policy on transphobia in online LGBT communities - that making a distinction between women and transwomen is transphobic and as a consequence results in a ban. At present, it is utterly bizarre to me, grotesque even, but I'll try to charitably present their position. Here is a paragraph explaining the rules of the lesbian subreddit, which is in line with most subreddits and forums I've been researching:

Things which are transphobic:

  • Not being interested in, or not dating, a specific woman because she is trans.

Trans women are women. They are often indistinguishable from cis women. They can't get pregnant, but neither can almost 10% of cis women, and fortunately in a lesbian couple there's usually a womb to spare. (With enough forethought you might not need a sperm donor!) Saying you're "not attracted to trans women" as a blanket statement cannot have a basis in empirical reality, but purely in prejudice. It's not like not being attracted to redheads or blondes or butches, it's like not being attracted to immigrants, children of blue-collar workers or survivors of cancer. "Trans" is, for the numerical majority of trans women, a history which says nothing about the person.

There's also an elaboration that since not all transwomen have a penis, and since not all transwomen can easily be detected as having male features, then saying that you are categorically opposed to dating transwomen (because of either a penis or male features) makes you a transphobe.

So their argument is that since (1) there are some transwomen who are physically indistinguishable from women, and (2) there are also women who cannot get pregnant but you would have no problem dating, then (3) your prejudice towards transwomen must be based on the principle that women and transwomen are ontologically different, and therefore this makes you a transphobe.

The main objection here is that there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb. The paragraph above was written by a transwoman and is, to me, wishful thinking. They link to an Instagram of a transwoman who is supposed to illustrate how women-like their appearance can be, but even with the best filters and makeup there is something off about them, and in person this would be easily spotted. Even if there are some who would realistically pass a first-impression test, their body (hips, jaw, Adam's apple, "vagina", body odor) would soon give them away, and possibly also their behavior would seem incongruent. And all of this is based on the premise that people's sexual preference are based on formal logic as opposed to general trends in a group's appearance - most transwomen are not even close to passing and that's why many men have a categorical aversion to transwomen.

I tried asking this question on a few different subreddits but my post doesn't even show up and I received one ban as well, so here I am. Can anyone try to justify the transphobia policy above?

One minor point: lesbian subreddits have a disproportionate number of trans woman mods. You shouldn't take what they say as representative of the broader community. The very fact that we see it declared a bannable heresy is an indication that there are heretics. A majority of lesbian women prefer to date natal women.

The main point: as a thought experiment, suppose it were possible to transplant a consciousness into a body grown in a vat or something. That body is indistinguishable in every way from a natal body of the same sex. And then you start dating someone who has one of these bodies and you like them more than anyone you've ever dated, but a month later they tell you their natal body was the opposite gender of their current ones, and you react with revulsion and end things. Is it "transphobic"? I don't love that word because it carries with it an overly negative connotation, but it does seem like it would be a psychological issue that wouldn't serve your own interests well. (Although the harm here would be to yourself, not to the "trans community").

Of course, it's a very relevant point that in the reality we live in we're currently far from creating bodies that don't leave a trace of their original sex.

This idea that consciousness and body are somehow separable is sort of mainstream especially around here, but it deserves more scrutiny. You are your body and vice versa.

Yes. But for that one scenario just say it is a brain transplant. They had that in a Ghost in the Shell episode. Some guy would put his cybernetic brain into female artificial bodies and have sex with men.

Which series was this, specifically? I don't remember it in SAC.

Season 1 episode 1 of Stand Alone Complex. "SA: Public Security Section 9 – SECTION-9"

Major: This next footage is of the Minister and a geisha going into the bathroom.

Aramaki: With a geisha?

Major: Apparently, he sometimes likes to swap bodies with geishas when he gets drunk.

First episode of SAC season 1, the foreign minister is "into body swapping" with geisha androids and given the context some sexual activity is implied. That's the background for the opening hostage scenario and provides the window for a foreign intelligence agent to put the foreign ministers brain in a suitcase and his own in the minister's body. Maybe crosswired with the SAC season 2 episode 3 CASHEYE where the VIP has some sort of fetish of having sex with androids (or full cyborgs) and the major offers to up the ante by letting him experience it from her perspective at the same time. The foreign minister from S1E1 gets a minor call back in that episode as well. Haven't seen the Hollywood movie but it borrows a lot from SAC including a geisha robot hostage situation so it might have featured there as well.

Or a literally gender fluid person? That character in the show was a masculine male politician and on the side had (staight?) sex with men as a woman. Some future person enjoying their favorite parts of publicly socially being a man and privately sexually being a woman.

They are people who have their brains surgically removed, cybernetically enhanced and placed in armored shells. They install their brains into artificial partially-robotic partially-biological bodies. With a few minutes and a bit of help someone could swap to a new body.

At that point I suppose that counts as real of a woman as any. Given that the real-real women are similarly artificial. But I know not everyone would be cool with that. I certainly wouldn't fuck my male friend if he swapped into a female body for a bit, like in that episode of that show. That's too weird for me.

I agree in part (i.e. that your body is part of your consciousness), but that doesn't imply that separation causes a new consciousness or identity. On a small scale, transplanting a kidney or losing an arm doesn't destroy a consciousness but at most transforms it (by changing the I/O patterns the consciousness experiences). If my magical technology actually existed, you could have a locker of bodies identical to your own and, in the case of a serious accident, have your consciousness switched to a new one and leave the destroyed body behind. Has your consciousness somehow suffered in the process?

That is a wider debate around transhumanism which would be fun if we could make it happen.

Seems to me that transhumanism is for those who are ashamed of their bodies.

There's a flavour of reddit type person who is smart, so of course believes that people's status should be derived from that alone. They are often ugly and have poor social skills. This person loves transhumanism.

Seems to me that transhumanism is for those who are ashamed of their bodies.

You don't need to be ashamed of your body to recognize that you can improve upon it.

We've spent much of our evolution path as a human society denying the legitimacy of the jungle hierarchy.

What's your take on walking canes and reading glasses?

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Improve upon it by getting some sort of robotic implant, magic smart pill: you're trying to escape the normal hierarchy, denying its legitimacy

That's not the same as being ashamed of it though. My heart will at some point give out, wanting a mechanical replacement is entirely within the normal hierarchy because it will be made by humans, created by our brains and our hands. Might as well complain about antibiotics and surgery surely? Eating properly requires your mind actualizing change into the world. Same with surgery and prosthetic limbs and replacement heart valves and beyond. Almost by definition anything we do is part of the normal hierarchy of the world. It cannot be otherwise.

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People I disagree with are ugly

There can actually be something important to a potential partner about the psychology of someone who would step into that lab grown body and the framing is doing a lot of work. It's like in the same scenario but instead you find out they have made all of their life decisions by consulting an aggressive psychic who they refuse to stop consulting the psychic or agree that psychics are not purveyors of truth.

I just want to point out that using irrational means to make difficult decisions isn’t necessarily wrong.

In traditional matchmaking, the irrationality of astrology was one of the best aspects of it. The matchmaker had knowledge of parental preferences and their broader social standing, so it wasn't fully random. But choosing one match over another was often considered a slight against the losing family and could result in a loss in standing. Astrology's opaqueness gave plausible deniability so everyone could walk away from the encounter while saving face.

Contemporary people sometimes use it now to soften the blow of rejection: blame it on the fact that the suitor is an Aquarius, and the suitor can just walk away mumbling to himself that the rejector is just crazy.

I suppose a variation of the framing would be to compare whether you'd judge a transwoman more harshly than a natal female who just took on a hotter synth female body.

You can still imagine there's just something off about someone who really didn't like their birth sex, in a way that's deeper or more problematic than someone who just wants to look hotter. But I'd want to see evidence of that (in that hypothetical world). Would gender swappers generally have worse outcomes or behavioral patterns than regular people?

This discussion would probably at some point call for an examination of Blanchard's autogynephilia hypothesis, i.e. that some men are sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as a woman, and that this is the motivational mechanism behind some trans sexuality. Now I am not the person to have that discussion because I know way too little about it. Autogynephilia sounds like the kind of thing psychologists would make up, honestly, but I am not qualified to make that claim on any proper foundation.

Many people are sexually interested in excrement, imagining yourself as the object of your desire seems like the kind of philia you'd be surprised if it didn't exist.

I think there's two different claims that need to be distinguished here.

It is undoubtedly true that some men have a "forced feminization" or "sissyfication" fetish. One only need google those two phrases, and you'd be presented with a ton of examples of this.

And at least some of the trans women online are open about formerly being AMAB with such fetishes.

However, the question is one of causality. Do the transwomen with sissyfication fetishes have them because they are trans, or are they trans because they have sissyfication fetishes?

I could easily imagine a world where people who are trans happen to like sexual fantasies where they magically get turned into women. It wouldn't be that different from women with rape fetishes - their guilt is a turn off, so a scenario that takes the control out of their hands and bypasses their guilt is incredibly attractive.

Seems like bog standard fetish drift to me. Didn't that come up some while ago in a discussion about conversion therapies? But yeah, fetishes tend to get more extreme over time, and you can absolutely meme yourself into having one. Combined with all the aggressive trans-propagandising going on where people say things like "if you're even asking the question of if you might be trans, then you probably are"...

Right, and my possibly slightly spicy take on this is that this is a much more understandable and reasonable justification for identifying as a woman than most I hear from trans advocates. I'm not surprised it's what many people assume is going on in most MTF cases when they called MTF Trans women perverts. I can't figure out the internal logic on transgenderism without a motivation like this. The only other reasonable alternative is that there is some internal sense of gender that I and people like me are blind to, and this is really hard for me to believe.

The only other reasonable alternative is that there is some internal sense of gender that I and people like me are blind to, and this is really hard for me to believe.

Even Blanchard's typology allowed for "homosexual transsexuals" ("gay men" who transitioned young in order to score straight men), so even in his theorizing there's more reason than sissyfication fetishes to explain being trans.

That said, I'm not sure I think one needs a bespoke "sense of gender" to explain trans people either. I doubt people evolved a specific biological mechanism to become true "weeaboos", and yet some subset of American youth immerse themselves in Japanese culture and entertainment all the same. I think this can easily be explained by more general mental mechanisms - autism-like special interests, being an outcast from mainstream culture, being extremely online, etc.

I suspect that sex is such an obvious social trait, that there would always be a non-zero number of people who get a trapped prior that their life would be better if they had been born the opposite sex (or could start living as the opposite sex), or who have general feelings of body dysphoria or feelings of social ostracism that get channeled through envy of the opposite sex in some way.

The question then becomes the best way to deal with this trapped prior. Unlike with a phobia, where the person is going to keep living in a world with, say, dogs, and it is probably best to use a reliable, evidence-based therapy to lessen or eliminate the person's trapped prior, I suspect that the existence of hormone treatments and surgeries make it more difficult to remove this trapped prior.

Supposedly, people's pain tolerance is lower if they know they can get a pill that will block their pain. This makes sense to me - if your only option is to endure pain, better that your baseline biology pony up with natural painkillers or distractions that make it easier to endure. But if you now know that there's a quick fix, your strategy naturally shifts to convincing the gatekeeper of pain pills that you deserve pills to block your pain. You'll subconsciously convince yourself that your pain is unbearable, because truly believing that your pain is unbearable is the best strategy to convince a gatekeeper of that fact.

Maybe the trapped prior of sex or sex role dysphoria is the same thing? You think the grass is greener some way (your soft male physique would be better received with boobs and make up, people would treat you more nicely, etc.), that your current life sucks (possibly true), and that your best option is to jump through all the hoops the local doctor sets up for you and get some hormones (or to just acquire some hormones from the black/grey market.)

In this model, the "social contagion" would just be the simple knowledge of the fact that semi-reliable treatments exist.

I don't know what the most responsible thing to do if the trapped prior model is correct. Do we have reliable ways to move trapped priors? Somehow, what gets called "conversion therapy" by opponents doesn't seem like a very likely way to work, but I don't know what the evidence actually looks like on that front.

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Right, and my possibly slightly spicy take on this is that this is a much more understandable and reasonable justification for identifying as a woman than most I hear from trans advocates.

Understandable to who?

Because the US political milieu and arguably legal system is biased towards claims about inherent characteristics (i.e. you can't discriminate against me cause I was born this way!). I don't think the "trapped in the wrong body" position is really carving reality at the joints (at least not in the normative sense people want - someone with a foreign limb could claim they feel "trapped" in their body - nobody thinks this validates their "identity", we just think they're delusional).

But that doesn't mean that it isn't useful, politically.

Edit: removed for potential consensus building, repetition.

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It's a whole can of worms, it would also be very important how they framed it. I find most of the current thought justifying transgenderism to be pretty vacuous and would be much more receptive to someone just saying they did it because they reviewed their options, maybe tried both and pragmatically decided that they'd prefer to be the opposite sex rather than all this mysticism around some immeasurable innate gender. Which I think is where your hypothetical breaks down, people care quite a bit about what their prospective partners think/believe. Someone who is convinced on psychics would make a bad partner for me regardless of their body. I do think there is also some matter of a lot of path dependent psychological development happens on one side of the fence or the other that can't be undone, and if it can that machine starts seeming a whole lot more like something that kills someone and then creates a new person.