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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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I can't really justify it aside from aspirational thinking. One day you'll be able to add "become woman" to cart and click checkout and that will work perfectly and completely and tracking cis or trans will be meaningless. But until that day comes we'll just have to pretend really hard that it's already here, is the quiet part of those policies, IMO.

How aspirational can one get about this?There's a little mini lesson for kids where you tell them if they're ever lost, find a police officer for help. But that's not helpful because most of the time there are no police around. So, it's been modified to: find a woman and ask them for help.

That seems fairly uncontroversial. Women are less likely to be predators and more likely to help, by just the power of statistics.

Ever since I've heard this I've been deliberately sizing random men and random women up in public and trying to imagine how they'd react to my lost 4 year old going up to them. Seems to pass the sniff test. To be clear, overall even most men give me the sense they'd be helpful and not predators, but women even moreso (I run into zero homeless insane looking women, for example).

But, does this still work if it's a trans woman? I've never met a trans woman who has given me the sense that they'd react anything like the median cis woman would if they came across a lost child. I just don't believe saying you're a trans woman makes you less dangerous than a random male is to a small lost child. If anything I would move slightly in the opposite direction because of all of the other unfair associated baggage that comes with being unlucky enough to be trans in our society.

I am genuinely curious what a trans inclusive feminist would say here.

Women are less likely to be predators and more likely to help, by just the power of statistics.

Very dangerous comment here, both insulting and misandrist. But you can be insulting and misandrist if you back it up with evidence.

However the stats (see e.g. conjugal violence ratio estimates would surprise you as the difference is not that major, or that much more men than women are beaten up in the street) supports that men should rationally fear more a stranger than a woman should fear.

Secondly this is utterly pointless as the statistics of criminals or "predators" shows that it is an extremely rare event. The extreme majority of men and women are harmless, the hysteria of the fear of the stranger and of the fear on men is potent mental degeneration and I would say a modern instance of cognitive pandemics a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518

(I run into zero homeless insane looking women, for example)

Women are much more likely to be helped hence it seems likely than less would spend enough time alone in misery to eventually become insane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect

How can someone lack the empathy to not realize insane people are extreme victims?

As a reminder men have 3 time the suicide rate.

However the topic on the conservation or not of gender specific advantages/inequalities upon gender transition is interesting.

It does sound like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy, doesn't it?

OTOH here's Gavin de Becker arguing for it.

https://gdba.com/best-advice-for-a-lost-child/

Is what I’ve said politically incorrect? Maybe so, but the luxury of not running for office is that I don’t care if it’s politically incorrect. The fact is that men in all cultures and at all ages and at all times in history are more violent than women — and facts are not political.

Sounds like one of those American things that make American men avoid even looking at children in public, or consider a job at a kindergarten etc, if they get told stuff like this as kids.

N=1, but I am not American, and my mom has told my brothers and I this kind of things as well. I also distinctly remember a certain amount of guilt on her face while she did, but there you go.

I was always told as a child that if I was lost and couldn’t find a police officer, I should ask a woman with kids for help, because moms were presumed to know what to do. This seemed to have loomed large, in my childhood memories- I don’t recall the lesson that I was supposed to think myself safer with random women than random men(and I was raised by a fairly strong sex negative feminist who had no problems talking badly about men in other ways), but that moms would know what to do and be able to help a child better.

I would consider it almost certain that trans of whatever description is more likely to fail the latter test than cisgender women or men, on average.

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