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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15569 thread views

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.

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.

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

People I disagree with are ugly

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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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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"...

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.

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.

Point deer make horse. Denial of reality as obvious as this makes for a strong signal of loyalty. Lesbianism is more political than biological anyway. You don't even have to sleep with a man dressed as a woman, you just have to agree it's a woman while other people are around.

[citation needed]

I can guarantee you that there are women out there who only fuck other natal, XX women.

I can provide citations but most data supports the idea that the vast majority of lesbians have had sex with men. This is in sharp contrast to gay men who generally only sleep with men, ever, suggesting true lesbianism is exceedingly rare

Not that I disagree, but maybe group sizes? If women generally are more 'fluid' in what they claim, there could be a "actual lesbian" population and a "college lesbian" population that is larger, and the former could be woman-exclusive while the latter would have sex with men.

"College lesbians" definately exist. I guess the question would be whether the "actual lesbians" exist, though I'd expect this to be one of those fraught questions that people just sort of give up on asking.

Probably a lot of (maybe all? idk) 'real lesbians' are such because of complicated environmental and intentional factors as opposed to 'born that way', but they are much more committed to it than the more casual lesbians are.

For being a lesbian? Source/explanation?

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Do you also mean grooming?

There are situational homosexuals. Prison, military, boarding schools, etc.

Also I'm mostly convinced that much of the 'experimenting' and binge drinking in my peer group in the 90's was largely due to lack of female companionship.

Alternatively, it's far easier to have sex with men than women. A lesbian woman can have sex with a man on a whim, while a gay man would need to exert some effort to have sex with a woman. The data you describe would arise naturally from that.

Maybe, but I doubt it’s about ease. Prostitution exists after all, if they were really wanting to try it.

I'm not actually sure prostitution is "easy" for people, even when they have the ability to pay and a legal environment favorable to prostitution.

Some combination of religious guilt, and social stigma would be more than enough to dissuade men looking for a good time from seeking out prostitutes.

A lot of incels who are terminally unhappy not only about their sexlessness but also about their virginity never go to prostitutes. Taking that kind of hit to your self-worth and become the kind of person who would solicit a prostitute (on top of other risks, such as legality and STDs) does not seem worth it for a lot of people.

A significant proportion of gay men (almost half) have had female sexual partners at some point. This dovetails with my ancedotal experience wrt to the gay men I know personally. The number is higher for lesbians, but not that much higher and it seems to be a difference of degree not of kind.

Yes I agree, what did I say to the contrary?

Oh...what did you mean by “lesbianism is more political than biological?”

I think lesbians are more motivated by dislike of men [they can attract] than attraction to other women. There's even a whole wiki article on Political Lesbianism, in which the proponents themselves assert this is a political choice. The corresponding article does not exist for gay guys, whose commitment nobody doubts. It also fits with the whole "lesbian dead bedroom" phenomenon. These things can all be true while there are many women who only have romantic encounters with other women.

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Lesbianism is more political than biological anyway.

Your comment is a bit... curt, I guess I want to say, given the strength of its claims. To much heat, not enough light. Which is not to say there's no light there, but if you're going to assert that lesbianism is "more political than biological," that seems like the sort of thing you should say with evidence, at least a bit. You didn't even hyperlink the idiom--some amount of shibboleth-slinging is bound to crop up in any community, but still it would be better to speak a bit more plainly.

m, 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.

My biggest problem is it's false advertising. You are not really hooking up with a woman, but only an approximation of one. Even if it could 100% pass a blind test, it's still categorically not the same thing. This is a such a messy subject that it's pretty much off-limits anywhere...if you think race & IQ is contentious, the trans issue is even worse.

You say "false advertising", but I wonder how far this goes. Suppose we get to a point that with minimal effort that all trans people undergo, they all start to pass as the gender they identify with to the point where, as far as hooking up goes, you fundamentally could not tell if they were cis or trans. Is this "false advertising" still?

This sounds like an argument that attributes what it means to be a "real woman" to something non-material in nature.

Well, for some people the deception is most of the problem. The idea that someone could so casually lie about something so huge. I don't think that needs overmuch explaining.

For others it's revulsion at the particular mode of femininity that seems to be adopted by those attempting to become female. They just do things normal women basically never do. "Dress go spinny!" and all that nonsense. The very stereotypical things they choose to wear and do, and the experiences they claim to have and enjoy. It all comes off as a man acting like what the thinks a woman acts like, instead of how women actually act. I don't know if those things would go away in the case of a magic perfect gender swap machine. The brain would still lack the socialisation and experience. Dressing it in a more appealing shell might blunt some of the disgust people feel, but I don't know...

Anti-TRA people like to bring up the "very male" responses these female aspirants come out with when challenged -- threats of rape and violence, fantasies about forcing themselves and their genitalia on unwilling lesbians. I don't know how much stock I put in that, I think pretty much everyone has the capability to be absolutely terrible, but it's possibly another point in the same vein.

Well, for some people the deception is most of the problem. The idea that someone could so casually lie about something so huge. I don't think that needs overmuch explaining.

If a person believes themselves to be a woman because they think you can self-identify into the category, this is a case of miscommunication, not a lie.

And if someone doesn't believe that, then it's a lie no matter how earnestly the speaker believes it. Confidently incorrect is still incorrect, and genuinely believing a lie doesn't make it true.

"God is real" is a lie to me, no matter how genuinely some people believe it to be truth.

"God is real" is a lie to me

the key point here is the "to me" part. I would argue that if two people hold different definitions on something, we cannot meaningfully call it a lie when one uses their definition in a way that contradicts the other's.

If I didn't think the opposite was a lie, how could I be meaningfully said to hold that my own opinions are true, when the two are mutually exclusive? If I truly believe that god is not real, then it stands to reason that I must also think the statement that god is real is a lie, no?

Common usage of the word "lie" would entail an intent to deceive i.e speak in bad faith. But two people who hold different definitions are not speaking to deceive the other, they're speaking from their own actually held beliefs. That you perceive it as a lie suggests you make no distinction between people who wish to actually mislead you and others who simply disagree.

No, that does not follow. You must also think that the statement that God is real is incorrect, but if the person offering the statement is sincere and without the intent to deceive, then it is not a lie.

Suppose we get to a point that with minimal effort that all trans people undergo, they all start to pass as the gender they identify with to the point where, as far as hooking up goes, you fundamentally could not tell if they were cis or trans. Is this "false advertising" still?

Probably, although you would never know it I suppose. But the point is that we very much do not live in that world. The idea that "a trans woman is indistinguishable from a woman" is a blatant lie, unless you're using something like the circular "a woman is anyone who says they're a woman" definition.

In the transhumanist future, we may get to the point that it's actually indistinguishable. At that point it's maybe false advertising in the sense that some people may have a disgust reaction if they found out they were sleeping with a trans woman, but they'd never know so the point is moot then.

Oh for sure, we don't live in that world right now. But we should be clear about what exactly would make someone reject a trans person as a suitable sexual partner. I think any argument that firmly rejects trans people as partners even if they could perfectly pass on every biological level is an argument rooted in some notion of a non-material essence inside a person that corresponds to gender.

I think any argument that firmly rejects trans people as partners even if they could perfectly pass on every biological level is an argument rooted in some notion of a non-material essence inside a person that corresponds to gender.

This is related to why most people fight hypotheticals.

It's all fine to talk about hypothetical situations as hypothetical situations. But this kind of hypothetical is used as a way to sneak in assumptions about the real world. Answering "sure, I'd accept trans people who were biologically identical to cis examples of that gender" is likely to be followed up with "well, how big are the differences really" or some other suggestion which tries to use the hypothetical example as a step towards saying something about the real world.

Even if the pizza hut meme is no longer true, and they're now indistinguishable from a natal woman. They still may be rejected because whatever is was that made them need to be a woman, is undesirable in a partner.

Based on Canada I think we'll have suicide booths before sex-swaping machines.

People form their attitudes based on the world that actually exists. Any reasoning involved would be based on central examples, not on edge cases.

In a transhumanist world full of casual, perfect, sex changes, where the central examples are nothing like they are today, the attitude towards dating trans people would be different from today.

Is this "false advertising" still?

Yes, some people would like to have children.

"Hooking up" and "trying to have kids" are two separate things. I agree that if you are looking for children, lying about the ability to have kids is a bad thing.

I don't think most people compartamentalize dating and hook-ups to that degree. The latter often leads to the former.

This sounds like an argument that attributes what it means to be a "real woman" to something non-material in nature.

Isn't this the exact problem the trans advocate camp runs into? If gender as non-material nature is off the table doesn't that collapse the whole concept before we even need to consider the body swapping stuff?

We may someday get this theoretical full gender swap machine, albeit very very far into the future, but the justification for using it and the subsequent question of whether someone would want someone who had done so is going to look totally different to modern day trans theory.

When people propose this thought experiment I think a whole lot of really load bearing stuff is getting papered over. Just the fact that we'd actually be able to use it to run experiments both as individuals curious about how the other side lives and collectively on gendered phenomenon is a huge game changer and if you're making assumptions on how those experiments would have gone those assumptions hide all the actual interesting implications of the thought experiment.

If a cis person went through the procedure do you think they'd have dysphoria? why or why not?

When people propose this thought experiment I think a whole lot of really load bearing stuff is getting papered over. Just the fact that we'd actually be able to use it to run experiments both as individuals curious about how the other side lives and collectively on gendered phenomenon is a huge game changer and if you're making assumptions on how those experiments would have gone those assumptions hide all the actual interesting implications of the thought experiment.

Thought experiments used in this manner are trying to get at what the root argument is. You can't say something like "We can't make trans woman perfectly pass" as your argument in this case because the hypothetical assumes that we can. It's a way of getting around the surface-level arguments some people co-opt. We had a discussion back in the subreddit about whether race-swapping in media is bad, and some people very clearly used "It's not being done well" as a reason to reject the idea as a whole.

If a cis person went through the procedure do you think they'd have dysphoria? why or why not?

Insofar as they identify with a particular sex, I think they would. If it's not a big part of your identity, I think you might just shrug it off like a minor irritant.

Suppose we get to a point that with minimal effort that all trans people undergo, they all start to pass as the gender they identify with to the point where, as far as hooking up goes, you fundamentally could not tell if they were cis or trans.

I bet that in such case they would have no problem with saying "I was born male, then rebuild myself as a giraffe and now I morphed to female form". But we are far away from this level of bioengineering no matter what would people claim.

The entire trans stuff is caused by uncanny valley of being able to imperfectly migrate - but extremely imperfectly with small minority achieving anything close to a success. Even if they do not care about fertility.

.if you think race & IQ is contentious, the trans issue is even worse.

I don't think this is true. I have a lot moderately conservative libertarianish friends and family. When the trans issue comes up we can all laugh about it and go "wow those woke people sure are crazy". But if I bring up race and IQ I get a lot of concerned looks and comments like "you better not say that in public".

I don't think it's just my social circle either. Look at mainstream Republican politicians and commentators. Many of them have come out and took a stand on the trans issue but they're all scared to even mention race and IQ.

I mean the left is more likely to ban or censure you for posting about trans stuff compared to race & IQ. both topics are radioactive. However, IQ alone is not too bad.

I think you're mistaking level of vitriol in online discussions for likelihood of banning/censorship. The trans discussion invites a high level of angry comments because it is, by and large, a tolerable discussion. The actual discussion is being had, and while leftist spaces might ban you for questioning whether trans women are actually women, right wing spaces will ban you for discussing race/IQ. There's no heat in those discussions because it is vastly outside the public's Overton Window. It is a socially acceptable position to hold that trans women are not really women. It might not be super popular, and it might not win you any DIE awards, but you can hold that position in a discussion with the average American and not come out the other end with your proverbial tailfeathers on fire. If you were to start discussing the correlation between race and IQ with the average American, you would be dismissed as a racist nutjob best ignored entirely.

@aqouta more or less has the right of it.

Trans communities have a vested interest in avoiding dysphoria. That usually includes a level of politeness which you might describe as “playing along,” just like any other social interaction. I’m not going to tell my cousin that his career choice is stupid, or my friend that her boyfriend is an asshole. Not without an invitation to frank and probably-painful discussion. Trans communities are generally not giving that invitation.

It’s hard to talk about these dynamics without bringing up “triggers” or “safe spaces” and their legitimacy. There’s a reason gender politics has aligned so well with Internet leftism. The steelman, there, is that trans people have the right to associate with those who will accept a certain brand of politeness. (And yes, there is equivocation between lacking the power to extend that space of acceptance and having the right to do so, but that’s kind of beside the point.)

Your observations about edge cases, Chinese robbers, and general motte-and-bailey are downstream of accepting this premise. Like every other social dynamic, politeness invites rationalization, if only to deal with outsiders. And like every sexual dynamic, saying basically anything without dissembling is gauche.

Trans communities have a vested interest in avoiding dysphoria.

What does being trans have to do with dysphoria? This sounds like transmedicalism; the truscum lost that internal conflict.

Has the distinction between transmedicalists, truscums, and tucutes ever been articulated on here? I would have assumed that due to the dominating market share of trans-accepting places on the internet that now default to the Gender Euphoria model of transness, Motte posters would be generally unaware of the 'battle' between older transgenders/transsexuals who fundamentally view gender dysphoria as a medical issue necessary of medical care (transitioning to the other sex) and a new wave of Extremely Online trans teenagers who think anyone who experiences Gender Euphoria (for which there are multiple definitions of) counts as transgender and that they are 'Too Cute' (hence the name) to be cisgender.

As for if there's a distinction between the terms transmedicalist and truscum, I keep finding conflicting opinions. Some people claim transmedicalist is the group's self-chosen name and truscum is an exonym placed upon them, others claim the two groups have different opinions on non-binary people and whether it is necessary for someone who is trans to transition completely to the opposite sex, and yet others claim the terms differ in that everyone can be a transmedicalist, but trans people who go against the Gender Euphoria model of transness get labeled as truscum. As with most terms created and spread by the internet, the history of the terms is unclear and more time will be necessary to see if the terms are going to mean the same thing, if they are going to end up with different definitions, or it one term will overtake the other completely in usage.

they are ‘too cute’ (hence the name) to be cisgender.

TIL that there are people with a stereotype of transgenders as cute. Do they mean cute as in ‘oh my gosh, look at this kitten’ or cute as in ‘she’s cute, I wonder if she’s taken’, I wonder? Neither fits my impression of trans people at all.

Cute like a girl's friend's new outfit is irregardless of the outfit itself.

So it’s becoming trans for social approval?

I try to avoid using the word grooming in relation to the trans debate, but, well…

The trans community seems to do pathological affirmation for allied groups. I've known people who did it like a mental tick. Something would remind them that group X existed, and then they would just start saying "X are cute and valid" like "Peace be upon Him". The really wild, schitzo part was when it would just chain off in free associations, all of whom are Heckin' Cute And Valid.

I tried working through with this post a bit, one of the things that does derange me about the whole topic is that you often needs to exchange several questions before you can peg which type of trans activist you're talking to and any individual trans advocate will shift between the different camps at will despite the many contradictions.

To be honest, I’ve never quite figured out what a truscum is. I gather there were some tumblr flame wars over the issue.

Contrary to the other response, though, I’ve heard a loooooooot more mention of dysphoria than euphoria, even in the modern Internet. Maybe the harm-based model just dominates relatively utilitarian rationalist forums?

A truscum is (roughly) a transperson who thinks gender dysphoria is necessary to be trans, and argues many 'new' trans people/nonbinary people, maybe without dysphoria, are just pretending/not really trans/stealing valor

A few years ago (or less?), there was a...we'll call it a debate...within the trans activist community that pitted the so-called "truscum" vs. the "tucutes."

The first group maintained that dysphoria was the essence of trans-ness, since the entire point of social transitioning was to leverage the trauma of dysphoria into a minimizing-harm obligation on the part of others to avoid "deadnaming," "misgendering," and other potential triggers of a painful downward emotional spiral for the trans person. Various types of dysphoria had already been recognized as real phenomena, so leaning hard on the trauma angle would maximize how much the activists could push for in terms of changing social norms.

The second group responded that gender expression is individual, infinitely variable, and unknowable outside of the lived experience, so relying on external validation made no sense. Besides, without the limits of a dysphoria diagnosis--which had always been vanishingly rare--the "trans" community could broaden the reach of its umbrella by orders of magnitude, increasing the size of the marginalized group that the activists claimed to represent.

The second group won, comprehensively. Going forward, trans identities could not be externally policed; they were strictly a matter of identification which would not be questioned. Naturally, the activists weren't going to give up the rhetorical advantages of the truscum position--"deadnaming" and/or other forms of "misgendering" is still literally violence that drives trans people to suicide, even without any form of dysphoria being present. "Transmedicalism" is a dismissive term of the truscum argument that trans identities derived from dysphoria--that they could be affirmed or negated by a medical diagnosis.

The steelman, there, is that trans people have the right to associate with those who will accept a certain brand of politeness. (And yes, there is equivocation between lacking the power to extend that space of acceptance and having the right to do so, but that’s kind of beside the point.)

Given the colonizing tendencies of that specific type of ideology (as a catch-all term for a world view with accompanying social norms and modes of enforcement), I don't think the freedom-of-association argument holds much water here. Keep in mind that the above quote was scrapped from what was originally a meeting place for lesbians.

Now I can't help but feel an immense amount of Schadenfreude that the identity group that has historically been the main driving force behind authoritarian progressivism and all its underhanded, discourse-destroying memes - namely, white upperclass women [1] - is finally getting a taste of that particular medicine now that the T faction has gained cultural traction. But if I step once again behind the veil of ignorance, the behaviour reminds me more of Albrecht Gessler rather than somebody genuinely concerned with politeness.

[1]NAWUCWALT [2], of course, but if I have learned one thing from identity politics over the course of the last two decades, it's that it doesn't matter.

[2] Not All Upperclass White Women Are Like That. Some, I assume, are good people.

The group in question here is lesbians, though, not heterosexual WUCW. It's not a coincidence that political progressivism has started policing who lesbians have sex with and not the broader group of WUCW.

WUCW are affected via the loss of privilges in other areas though. Exclusive sports leagues, for example.

And hopefully, soon, the erosion of female-exclusives scholarships, mentorship programmes, preferential hiring practices, etc. But I fear the straw fire that is the T debate will burn out before it comes to that on a larger scale.

I’m not going to tell my cousin that his career choice is stupid, or my friend that her boyfriend is an asshole.

It's useful and interesting when people say such blunt things to me personally - it either surfaces correct and incisive criticisms, surfaces glancing but still interesting criticisms, reveals the existence of deeply incorrect criticisms or grudges (which is also interesting), or even if it's just a joke can be very funny. The 'hurtful' nature of it is - if the accusation is true, correct and worth understanding (if you have a physical wound you didn't notice and someone points it out, the problem is the wound, not the person pointing it out!), and if the accusation is false, ignorable, and corresponding combinations thereof. Naturally, many of the close-ish friends I've had who are trans were of a similar mind, and regularly made very "transphobic" jokes and found them funny, and didn't mind genuine anti-trans philosophizing.

I would like to see the original context. Can you provide a link, or at least give the actual name of the subreddit in question? There's more than one lesbian subreddit.

I think it's from here.

Thank you so much!

This makes me pretty unimpressed with OP. For one thing, this isn't a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit," as OP claims. It's an opinion from an ordinary user. It's also preceded by several important caveats that make it less inflammatory than if it had started from the place where OP begins their quote. Also, it's from nine years ago -- how far did they have to dig in order to find something they could quote out of context in order to make it sound suitably threatening?

@KingKong, I don't think you posted this in good faith. You omitted important context. You didn't provide a link so people could check. And you lied about what the post actually was.

You should be ashamed. The culture war is hot enough without misrepresenting things deliberately in order to cause drama.

If there are existing rules posts by subreddit mods that say this, then OP should have posted one of them! Then calling it a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit" would not have been a lie, and we could have had this conversation on a sound, truthful basis.

This nit-picking reminds of the "law vs commentary" legal case where some US state didn't make clear if commentaries on its laws are legally binding, but still considered them non-public domain.

Here, there is no ambiguity, as @gattsuru points out, and expecting leniency from reddit mods, particularly of a sub as politically charged as the one under discussion, is misguided.

Just because a distinction doesn't matter to you, that doesn't mean it couldn't possibly matter to anyone on a forum like this, where we aim for breadth of worldviews. Accuracy matters. I like to know exactly what I am commenting on.

With that said, I was unaware that this post had in fact been officially linked to, and have therefore apologised for jumping to an unflattering conclusion. I'll be posting a longer reaction to the substance of the matter at hand in a bit, now that I've been able to get the details I needed.

To be fair, at least on the old.reddit configuration, this page is linked under "Policy on Trans Women and Dating" on the right side bar under "Important things to read!"; on new!reddit, it's available from the "Friendly Reminder: Please Read AL's Policies Before Posting", under "AL's Official Policies" header, right after the "Self-Picture (Selfie) Policy", again as "Policy on Trans Women and Dating." which implies it was accepted at least as of three years ago. I think it's reasonable to take it as the official rules of the subreddit, and I would genuinely expect it to still be enforced.

On the gripping hand, the third Official Policy notice is to a long-deleted "Please Read: Labels and Sexual Orientation Policy" (original), so there's clearly some link rot going on. And I do agree that it's chopped at least a bit out of context and limitations.

Oh, I see! That makes a bit more sense, then. Thanks for clarifying, and sorry to @KingKong for assuming the worst.

Wow, it's amazing reading the histories of those accounts. Most are still active 9 years later (none I've checked have been suspended, which is a first), and literally every single one is ranting about how only mass murders will crush capitalism to solve the climate crisis. If they really are the trendsetters for the modern internet, we're in for an even worse decade.

Why is "the Trans Question is an infohazard that is bound to damage the community in one or another if its discussion is allowed" not a sufficient justification for having a policy like that? If I were in charge of running a space like that, I'd impose the same rule, just for that reason.

The more interesting question, to me, is once again the exclusive focus on women. From what I've seen of various statistics, the number of FtM transitions and the number of MtF transitions is basically on the same order of magnitude everywhere; yet, if I looked at the internet, I would get the impression that "trans" is a category completely dominated by MtF. Do similar rules to the above exist in gay subreddits? Do gay subreddits need rules like that? The only context in which I've seen anyone complain about FtM transitions were claims of the type "our underage daughters will be brainwashed into mutilating themselves by social contagion", so, once again, concern for women. It seems that people on almost all sides of this debate are fundamentally in agreement that women are the only category that matters ethically and aesthetically.

Many worries about MtF are about males getting access to females spaces and overpowering them due to psychical power greater than woman have (sports have the least emotionally charged and the most objective case of that).

This does not apply to FtM.

Also how many FtM and MtF are there?

Also how many FtM and MtF are there?

FtMs outnumber MtFs 3:1. The mainstream doesn't talk about it because it raises too many uncomfortable questions and possibilities.

How many of those who pursue medical changes?

They don't seem to be that keen on sharing that data.

It seems that people on almost all sides of this debate are fundamentally in agreement that women are the only category that matters ethically and aesthetically.

Men have agency with no inherent value and women have inherent value with no agency as the default assumption in society is not that spicy of a take. The 'F' on a driver's license entitles you to aid, scholarships, segregated spaces, special prizes, uneconomical programs to support you, general praise for even the most commonplace achievement, a benefit of the doubt, shorter criminal sentencing and much more; The 'M' on your driver's license entitles you to being forced to die in some god forsaken shithole and a lifetime of being held in suspicious or contempt. This is like asking why there is so much less security preventing Americans from going into Mexico than Mexicans going into America. And yes, gay guys are much much better at telling people they don't want to sleep with to pound sand, "No rice" is still incredibly common on gay male dating profiles.

I repeat myself, but generally, among the middle and upper classes in the West, women are the privileged group. They have access to provision, protection, and social concessions that men do not have access to and they are exempt from male duties. A man wanting to switch social categories is in dereliction of those duties and is seen as someone claiming privileges they are not entitled to. The reaction to MtF AND to FtM becomes quite understandable in that light. Nobody cares if a woman wants to live on hard mode.

It seems that people on almost all sides of this debate are fundamentally in agreement that women are the only category that matters ethically and aesthetically.

The world starts making a lot more sense when you just accept traditional gender roles, and see nearly everyone denying them as engaging in an elaborate social ritual.

And it's not that men don't matter ethically, but there's the protectors, and the protected. What else do you expect to see in that case?

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.

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.

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.

The rule is don't say something that someone might get offended by irregardless of the truth and if you're really good you can avoid anything that could even imply something offensive. Taken in the context of a place trans people have made their presence known and where it is known that trans people are offended at any implication that they are not the same as cis people of their chosen gender this means to be polite one must deny that there are differences. The truth value doesn't matter at all, this is 100% about feelings(I don't mean this as a sneer, I'm just describing how the social pattern works).

They don't say this outright because it would be required to explain that the truth isn't important which itself would break this rule by implying that trans people are only being humored. This doesn't just apply to trans people, it's the same basic pattern as healthy at every size or not telling libertarians at the conference that they'll never be elected if they can't fit public roads into their policy positions. If you've ever done the dance itself it all is pretty intuitive, especially in person.

It’s not just trans people, women in general and feminine men tend to value feelings over truth (on average). Since these spaces are dominated by lesbians and feminine men (gay men) they tend to focus on feelings and social harmony over truth value or free speech

valuing not visibly upsetting or insulting others isn't "valuing feelings", it's a specific dynamic. Women don't value "feelings" generally more than "facts" (how would that even work, feelings come from facts), they value social appearances and ideas more.

No, you’re wrong. Visibly upsetting someone or invisibly upsetting, it’s the same. In other words, it’s feelings.

I also never said facts, I said truth. When two truths collide, the emotional truth wins out in these spaces, that is incontrovertible

My point is that 'upsetting' != 'feelings'. 'Feelings' ... there are a lot of definitions/meanings for that term, none of which really make sense as a separate thing, but it almost always is seen broadly - the classic idea is that "happy", "sad", "mad", "tired", "bored" are relevant. "Upsetting people" is bad, yes. But that isn't because women value feelings, it's a specific dynamic involving upsetting or insulting or demeaning people. Same for emotional - 'avoiding upsetting people' is not "the emotional winning", that's proves way too much, racist or sexist or offensive 'strong emotions' do not win out against opposing less-strong emotions!

feelings come from facts

I've found this to be true for myself, and other straight men.

In my experience this is much less true, with straight women and a type of homosexual men. In many situations they'll experience an emotional response to a set of perceived facts, or their lived truth. Later they'll remember the feeling, in spite of their facts being a poor fit for reality.

My model is that they are predators: Mixing them with real women provides camoflague to stalk and pick off their sexual prey.

Like another poster says, point deer make horse but actually point tiger make sheep.

Wolf/sheep was right there for you and you missed it. Wolf in sheep's clothing, boy who cried wolf, point wolf, make sheep.

I deliberately avoided wolf because tigers are stripey which fits the topic better I think. Rainbow stripes.

Imposing a cost on a) noticing and b) not noticing is a good way to keep the membership sharp.

I don't think the position is right -- a lot of people care about fertility enough to torpedo in cis-cis relationships, a lot of people make romantic decisions on statistic matters as much as empirical reality, and there are 'non-physical' concerns that matter -- but :

The main objection here is that there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb.

I don't think this is right, either, or at least not arguing the same thing from their perspective as from yours.

Now, admittedly, I'm a bi furry, so my scales are probably not anywhere near the typical. And there's some blurry lines between "can easily be detected" and "indistinguishable". And the links from the actuallesbians post you're quoting is more highlighting trans woman the poster thought hot, more than thought especially undetectably trans. But I think there's a couple meaningful underlying threads that aren't in the obvious read:

  • The exact definition of 'indistinguishable' is not a bright line. There's probably some activist who'd make arguments about a XX transwoman, but even if such a person actually identified as trans rather than intersexed or something anyway, the more meaningful bit is that most people don't do random karotype checks of potential dating partners to avoid the one-in-fifty-thousand complete androgen insensitivity case.

  • There's a tendency to compare the most visible trans women to a platonic ideal of feminine beauty (and, to a lesser extent, trans men to masculine stereotypes). Even outside of the direct problem where out people are out by definition, and that a lot of the most visible trans women are not exactly central examples for a variety of reasons, a lot of actual women are pretty butch! This doesn't even have to be a Weird Gender Thing; 'she's just tall' or 'she's just butch' predates a lot of modern trans discourse. But there's a perception of all trans woman as 6-ft tall Adam's Apple-and-five-o'clock-shadowed pink dress wearers that's not really a good model.

  • The actual sex stuff isn't great, but it's also come a long way, in ways that aren't well-understood from outside. That's even truer in the lesbian field, where some of the limitations (not getting as wet, needing a lot of exercise to take a moderate-sized dick) are likely to be important. Even for trans guys, there's still a long way to go, but something like reelmagik (cw: if you google this, you will get pages of silicone dicks) aren't going to get the full feel of heat or the splatter, for obvious reasons, but they've got options that either wouldn't stand out or would only stand out in good ways in a crowded locker room.

  • (And, conversely, a lot of people who object to relationships with trans folk won't be pacified were we talking something like magical cloned replacement organs; cfe the discussion in the rest of this thread.)

I don't think I'm sanewashing the position. From original context:

It's valid to be not into penii. this is, possibly, the only context in which anyone is allowed to care about a trans woman's genitalia.

So there's at least some recognition that there's going to be practical differences.

That's not to condone the model, or to say that it's complete, but more that a lot of the disagreement is over definitions rather than point deer make horse problems.

It's valid to be not into penii. this is, possibly, the only context in which anyone is allowed to care about a trans woman's genitalia.

Is it also valid to not be into what I believe is called a neo-vagina (i.e. the result of bottom surgery)?

I'm off the market so it's not really a concern for me, but I do have a preference for some vagina shapes over others, and some I find unappealing. From the (probably biased) selection of pictures of the results of bottom surgery I have seen, neo-vaginas very much fall into the latter category, especially when we also take some of the medical complications into account that come with them - those of the olfactory kind, for example.

I can't speak for other people, but the linked thread starts with a pretty general :

Not being interested in, or not dating, a specific woman who does not currently have the genitalia you prefer.

And there are specific trans women in that thread who share your specific opinion ("intricacies like shape, smell, taste, mechanics") and didn't get a ban-hammer over it.

Well, speaking for myself I can say that even if I did meet a man who I felt physically attracted to but who I later found out was a transman, I would probably decline to pursue them because I have a categorical aversion to dating natal females. And I do suspect that many people feel similarly, i.e. that many straight men wouldn't date a transwoman they felt attracted to specifically because they have a categorical aversion to dating natal males, ditto for straight women not wanting to date transmen, lesbians not wanting to date transwomen, et cetera. So I think there is something to the notion that a refusal to date trans people isn't always based purely on physical attraction or lack thereof, and has something to do with not wanting to date people of certain categories/identities.

I don't think attitudes like that are transphobic though, it's not like I don't want to date natal females because I have something against them. Nor is the fact that I group transmen with natal females some kind of value judgement. Nowadays simply not validating a trans person's gender identity is considered transphobic, but I don't agree with that. I think there's a world of difference between having contempt for trans people and simply not agreeing with them about which gender category they fall under, and we should draw clear distinctions between these attitudes and describe them using different words.

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It's pretty simple really. Mocking or ridiculing them for being trans, taking it as a sign they're a potential sexual predator, suggesting violence should be visited upon them for being trans, wishing them to be disowned by their family or socially ostracised generally, celebrating high rates of suicide among them would all constitute holding trans people in contempt: basically, considering them to be bad people, expressing hatred toward them or wishing harm upon them.

Whereas not validating their gender identity, i.e. refusing to agree that trans women are women or trans men or men, whether or not one chooses to use their preferred pronouns, is obviously not in line with modern pro-trans ideology but doesn't indicate a hatred of them. Nor does believing they should not be treated the same way as cis members of their preferred gender when it comes to sports or changing rooms or prisons and other gender-segregated spaces, or believing they should not be medically transitioning at a young age or without going through a thorough screening process to verify their gender dysphoria, or that in some cases transition is not necessary. Basically it just comes down to the fact that not affirming their beliefs or identity isn't the same thing as despising them the way people on places like /pol/ tend to.

My best attempt is that "woman" is being used in two different senses here.

"Woman" in the context of "wlw" (i.e. "woman-loving women") refers to the objects of a certain type of sexual attraction. Thus, its definition is pretty simple and hard to alter - the things and traits that get a wlw aroused, usually ones that the wlw herself also has.

"Woman" in the context of "transwomen are women" at least nominally refers to a particular kind of social presentation, often associated with verbal and interpersonal focus vice objects and processes, physical weakness/vulnerability, and certain aesthetics including but not limited to the use of particular kinds of cosmetics and the wearing of certain types of hairsyles, cosmetics, and clothes.

This causes problems because: (1) no-one can be secure in the knowledge that they are successfully performing "womanhood" without external validation from society (that's the point of something being a "social performance," after all), and (2) for obvious reasons, many central properties of womanhood-as-social-performance are also arousing to men and wlw. Thus, a lack of sexual interest in transwomen from men and/or wlw - or worse, a claim that transwomen can never be arousing to men or wlw under one or more conditions (i.e. if the transwoman still has a penis and/or testes, or doesn't have female-typical breasts) - is a permanent black mark against the transwoman's ability to fully perform "womanhood."

Insofar as the transwoman's identity and self-worth is bound up in the idea that they are, or are meant to be a woman, being confronted with a permanent shortfall must be quite distressing, which in large part explains the vehemence around the issue. The other part, naturally, is explained by the fact that people in general want to have sex, and being categorically-excluded from desirability as a sexual partner would be also distressing in general (e.g. Incels).

This, of course, rings hollow to the wlw who are in effect being told "shut up and fuck someone you don't want to, bigot!" But the people implementing rules like this are on a righteous crusade for an oppressed group's justice. What they think is likely to happen here is beyond me, though some obvious candidates include:

(1) they legitimately think social pressure can effectively gaslight and/or mold people into changed sexual preferences, and that ultimately people can lose specific physical attractions and/or be convinced to deprioritize them in preference to other, trans-inclusive traits. (This would be an ... interesting stance to take in light of other positions common to this group about homosexuality and/or transgenderism, but pace the Caliph here we all know that arguments are very much soldiers in this discourse)

(2) they're in the metaphorical position of Friedman's "distributor of welfare funds" - allocating burdens to other people, to solve yet another group of other people's problems. Under these conditions, there's little incentive to look too closely at the downsides (after all, there's no burden being imposed on the distributor), but every incentive to be generous to the recipient (isn't charity a virtue?).

(3) they personally do not feel their own sexual attraction to be constrained by qualities that transwomen are incapable of having, and are engaging in that most common of failure modes - typical mind fallacy.

(4) they are acting in bad faith.

(5) ???

I am not going to speculate about particular motives, but it's a sad problem - as, I find, are many of the problems associated with the modern space of gender discourse/confusion.

I suspect that the answer is simply that the people pushing these policies are wrong. ‘Trans women are often indistinguishable from cis women’ is a blatant lie, as you note, and so is ‘trans is… a history which says nothing about the person’. This is about forcing people to go along with a set of obvious falsehoods because of some reason or other, which I suspect boils down to the feelings of trans women. So in that sense, you can’t justify it without buying into their trivially false frame.

I think the closest thing to a justification would be a bare-faced assertion of a veritable asteroid shower of Russel's Teapots of trans individuals. If you take it on faith that there are innumerable trans people who pass without fanfare in their day to day life, then you can get to the above position.

Of course, you can only hold to that position not only by asserting the existence of the many perfectly stealth trans individuals, but by censoring both the first-hand reports of people who can clearly see that male and female are distinct clusters, and that there are several key distinctions (several of which you mention). But again, if you take it on faith that there are a horde of trans passing people, then people who say they can tell the difference can only be lying, as must be the various medical literature, and likewise any experiments anyone poses which show how poorly a sample of trans people pass in person must be poorly-constructed and malicious.

I think you can end up with similar justifications if you posit any kind of holy doctrine and any kind of powerful Satanic deceiver figure. If you have a revealed truth and a way to dismiss any claims that would challenge that truth, you can justify any excesses the revealed truth claims.

Can anyone try to justify the transphobia policy above?

Justify? No. Explain?

Well, it seems quite clear. They want others to believe that current medicine is able to actually achieve full male-female body swap. This is clearly untrue, but they want other to believe that (or pretend to fully believe). Maybe they even believe it themself. Or believe that they believe it.

Thanks to @gattsuru for important context. Given that I've made such a fuss about defining what was actually said, I should probably also give a response on the subject! Apologies if it's not quite what you were looking for, however.

I don't personally like this, as a general definition of transphobia. One response I've seen to the complaint that we're "not allowed to distinguish between trans women and other women" is that of course you can make that distinction. There's even an adjective for it: trans women. This is ... fair, but in my view it entails certain things. One of these is that people should be allowed to decide that they are not romantically or sexually attracted to trans women as a class, if that's really how they feel. This is a really personal topic, and asking people to rearrange their innermost feelings is a much stronger request than just asking them to rearrange their language and/or manners. Give people some space, and if they're not going out of their way to be hurtful to you, then don't threaten them on a subject that's as personal as this.

With that said, I don't think your particular complaint has much weight, here. If "there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb," then a person could simply respond that, well, feminine phenotypes are really important to me, and if I meet a trans woman who reaches my standards on that point, then, sure, I might be open to dating her if other aspects were in alignment, hooray, congratulations to me on my non-transphobia, problem solved.

I will also say that, on a subreddit, it's highly likely that the subject of "Would you date a trans woman?" doesn't come up in the practical sense. People aren't actually meeting partners there. Instead, the subject is much more likely to only be mentioned in conjunction with statements that are transphobic like "trans women are ugly" or "trans women are likely to be predatory." I can see this being a useful place to draw the line, for discussion purposes. I still don't think it's a good rule, because it will bleed out into situations that do involve actual dating, and that's not good for respecting people's preferences. But I can understand why, on a subreddit, the immediate concerns of the community might lead people to draw lines that are optimized for the specific online context.

There are plenty of posts in the CW thread lamenting the takeover of modern TV and movies by 'wokeness,' I figured it might be interesting to look at another area, namely sci-fi novels.

The Hugo Award is probably the most well known science fiction writing award, having existed since 1953 and helping to launch many famous authors' careers such as Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and many more. Unfortunately, the quality of this award, among others, seems to have gone sharply downhill recently. Specifically, they are becoming overtly political and focusing primarily on female and POC authors.

This phenomenon started back in 2014-2015, and has received massive backlash since the genre of speculative fiction (science fiction + fantasy) is overwhelming male, and seems to select for high systematizers. There have even been organized voting campaigns against the political skew of the Hugo, predictably shut down hard by the social justice camp.

I was recently looking for a new sci-fi series, and stumbled upon Ancillary Justice, a sci-fi novel that won the first so-called 'Triple Crown' of Sci-fi, the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Despite never having heard of the other two besides the Hugo, I figured that should be a good enough endorsement of the series. I was wrong.

The flaws with this first novel, as I only read about a fifth of it before quitting, are numerous. The basic premise is that the main character used to be an Artificial Intelligence who ran a starship, and communicated/perceived primarily through captured human bodies, called Ancillaries. She (the AI) was betrayed, and now is stuck in a single human body, plotting revenge. Why a super powerful AI needs to take over human bodies is never explained, but we'll chalk it up to suspension of disbelief.

This former-AI-being, despite having lived for over 2,000(!) years, is laughably incompetent and emotional while still managing to come off as a flat character. Starting on a backwater planet called Nilk, where she has been living for almost twenty years, she consistently manages to piss off the locals by mis-gendering them. This is because, as the author takes pain to remind us, the Radch Empire which she came from has one singular gender (or doesn't care about gender, it isn't clear) and the default pronoun is 'she.' This odd convention leads to such beautiful passages as (emphasis mine):

"She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked. She didn’t realize what she was playing with. She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt."

This inconsistent gendering is constant throughout the novel, to the point where it's difficult to trust the gender of any character. You literally have characters introduced using female pronouns, only to find out two chapters later that it was actually a male character, the former-AI-turned-SJW just failed to correctly gender them!

Despite the fact that this is beyond frustrating from a reader perspective of trying to visualize the characters, it makes literally no sense given the world building. You're telling me that a millenia-old AI, who has explicitly spent centuries studying human expressions, culture, and communication, is so incompetent they can't correctly gender humans in a society they've been living in for twenty years?? Keep in mind this mis-gendering literally threatens the main character's life at multiple points. The amount of mental gymnastics required to suspend my disbelief at this point was far too much.

And yet, despite this inane premise (and the fact that according to many other reviewers, the book never gets better, there's barely any plot, and the AI's scheme for revenge is utterly flawed) this book received massive amounts of praise. Not just from the sci-fi establishment, but more general institutions too such as NPR, and various other celebrities. They somehow try to turn this confusing writing style into a good thing because it encapsulates a 'poignant personal journey':

It won't be easy. The universe of Ancillary Justice is complex, murky and difficult to navigate — no bad thing, as Leckie's deft sketches hint at worlds beyond, none of them neat. Most obvious are the linguistic disconnects: Breq's home tongue uses only "she," reinforcing her otherness as she constantly guesses at genders in other languages.

Now you may ask - why does this matter? Unfortunately, as many know here, awards are a zero-sum game. Speculative fiction, especially fantasy, is entering the main stream with hits like Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Right now we already have issues of adaptions being too focused on social justice narratives, even though many of the underlying works were popular due to their gritty, realistic, and often misogynistic worlds.

Writing fiction is a brutal career. Amateur authors often spend literally decades building a name for themselves, so short story magazines, awards, and other ways of gaining notoriety and funds are extremely important. If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically. Writers who can't write woke fiction simply won't be able to support themselves.

When it comes to modern entertainment, science fiction novels especially have been one of the last bastions of male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing. It seems that where the genre goes could be an important bell-weather for the future of the culture war in entertainment.

It's been a few years since I read Ancillary Justice, but I remember disliking it quite a bit as well. My main complaint, if memory serves, was that the author had some interesting ideas but never had a good story to back them up. The plot just was boring. And like you, I came away firmly convinced that the awards for the book were a diversity pick, and that if a male author had presented the same book it would've been panned.

In all honesty, at this point I would take the Hugos (and similar industry awards) to be a negative mark on a book, not a positive one.

I'm not sure I would go that far, even though I do think they've sold out. The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin was particularly impressive, to the point that I gave it a full five stars, rare for me. Jemisin is a black woman, but she wrote an incredible series that really ticked all the boxes for me.

Honestly that series is what put the Hugos on the map for me, thinking they were a decent mark of quality. Other notable good winners/runners up in recent years are Project Hail Mary, 2313 by Kim Stanely Robinson, Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, A Dance with Dragons and Leviathan Wakes of course.

I suppose my issue is that the Hugo has a decent track record of picking pretty good books. Even if they catered slightly towards more progressive works, i.e. used that as a metric to win a close tie, that would be fine. What made me utterly frustrated with Ancillary Justice was that the book had no redeeming features whatsoever in my mind, and won out against greats in the genre like Charles Stross / Brandon Sanderson (WoT) who were runners up.

I'm shocked that you had never heard of the Hugos before Jemesin. For me it was Ender's Game, which had the Hugo Winner sticker plastered all over it. That plus Speaker for the Dead were my introductions to the award, but then I looked at the winners, and found many, many great books.

The year prior to Card's back-to-back, Gibson won with Neuromancer.

The 70s were stunning with, in order starting from 1970, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ringworld, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (ignore this one), The Gods Themselves, Rendezvous with Rama, The Dispossessed, and The Forever War. The 60s were great, too:

1961 A Canticle for Leibowitz

1962 Stranger in a Strange Land

1963 The Man in the High Castle

1966 Dune

1967 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

1968 Lord of Light

The good books lasted through the 90s, with Hyperion, A Fire Upon the Deep, Green Mars / Blue Mars, Forever Peace, and A Deepness in the Sky. It was this last one, in 2000, that marks what I consider to be the end of the predictive power of the award. In 2001 Harry Potter won, and the award had some hits in the years following (American Gods in 2002, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 2004, Rainbows End in 2007), it never really was the same, and finally died in 2013. Redshirts was about two-thirds of a good book, and had no business winning. 2014 is Leckie's book, which beat Wheel of Time. 2015 was when Cixin Liu won because his was the only book that wasn't on the original Rapid Puppy slate. Then comes three years of Jemesin, and since then we've had basically nothing but white male transsexuals and colored females even nominated, with predictable outcomes.

I get what you are saying about "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" (great premise let down by lack of 'now where do I go?' plot development and poor execution) but Philip José Farmer has always been hit-or-miss, and you will either really like the Riverworld series or be mildly disappointed.

I've had a copy of Riverworld sitting on my shelf for years, worth a shot? Hearing about the later books sorta put me off trying.

With the caveat that it's 70s SF and so of its time. But it's a fantastic premise: every single human being that has ever lived (up to a certain date) has been resurrected on an alien planet beside a seemingly endless river. Who did this? How? What is the intention behind it? And by "every single human being", Farmer really means that - from Neanderthals to Jesus and Buddha. Villains and heroes both, all starting afresh with (at first) no advantages at all.

The first book sets up questions that later books don't really answer adequately, but the first one at least is worth a go. You'll know soon into it if it's for you or not.

I must confess, I've never read it. Rama and Forever War were my two favorite from the 70s.

There's not much truly recent that I can recommend. Kim Stanley Robinson is still publishing new works like 2312. Jim Butcher has been nominated for the Hugo a couple of times, including for Skin Game, but I'm not going to call that representative of golden age sci-fi. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is six years old.

Blue Mars

Blue Mars won a Hugo? How? Did they have an off-by-one error and mean to award Red/Green Mars? (Looks like Red Mars was up against A Fire Upon the Deep, so I see how it lost) ... glancing at the nominations list, yeah, okay, I guess that was a pretty weak year. Only other book I've read there is Holy Fire and I thought it was actually a good book unlike Blue Mars but I can see how it lost to the third in a series with two good entries already.

I liked Blue Mars, and while Green Mars won, Red Mars didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a capstone or make-up award.

I actually loved To Your Scattered Bodies Go lol. It's so insane.

The Gods Themselves

I had no idea this won! I love this book, one of the little gems I found in a secondhand store years ago. Had no idea it was so popular. That list in general is damn impressive.

Seems like you've been tracking it a lot longer than I have, though I've stumbled on a bunch of those. Not sure how I hadn't looked into the Hugo earlier. I had heard it mentioned here and there but never really took a look at the winners.

The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin was particularly impressive, to the point that I gave it a full five stars, rare for me.

If the writers would just write and shut up about their politics, it might work for everyone. I can't even try the Broken Earth series because of all the gushing critical praise about how this is all about racism and whiteness and men being violent to women (but if women are violent and angry that is fine and dandy). The reviews make me want more to spork out my eyes than read the books.

The Broken Earth trilogy is quite a bizarre read from a cultural perspective because of how it mangles its messaging despite ostensibly being very progressive. A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice. But Jemisin's public notoriety clearly rules out that she's trying to do something like that, so you have to assume she is just really incompetent at creating a consistent political message - except that the books themselves are still really good, so I have no idea how it ended up so muddled.

*So the book is about a world that is riddled with massive, years-long natural disasters. Human towns are all organized by caste, with people set apart as good workers or breeders or administrators and so on. The towns are advised to maintain good ratios of these castes and to encourage breeding that helps this. This is never described as eugenics or really discussed within the books, it is just accepted as the right thing.

The main characters of the book are from a race blessed with magical, geomancy-like powers. This race is discriminated against harshly and called "roggers" or something obvious like that, I can't remember exactly. However, because of their power, every member of this race is basically capable of slaughtering entire towns, and children often have very little control over their powers and are shown accidentally killing other children. In this context, the fear people have of them is clearly the correct stance and in most cases it would be wise to avoid the geomancers or require them to be closely controlled.

A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice.

Maybe the book's message is confused because the politics that it's trying to sell is similarly confused.

Imagine a present day book which praises BLM rioters and simultaneously complains about racism. You could read that, in an unintended way, as "racism is the right choice because black people are violent rioters".

That makes sense for the racism analogy, but I have no idea how the eugenics stuff went in there and no one, not Jemisin or her editors, noticed what it was

I read it without getting into a ton of reviews and actually didn't think it was woke at all. I was surprised to learn there was so much controversy around it.

I wonder if that's more from interviews and such the author has given, where she's said the books are about black people being treated badly by white people and so on:

N.K. Jemisin: As a black woman living in modern day America, I have lots of questions about validity and exploitation. Black Lives Matter and this book were born out of the same anger and pain. I was sitting at home and writing parts of this book as I was watching Ferguson unfold on Twitter. We saw again and again the names of people who had been extrajudicially murdered. I drew inspiration from a lot of different oppressive situations. One of the protagonists has lived her life as a woman in hiding, effectively similar to a closeted queer person. I’m interested in systems that are exploitative towards oppressed groups for specific reasons.

This looks a lot like our own world except periodically — every two or three hundred years — there is a seismic event powerful enough to kick off something that the locals call a Fifth Season. It’s some kind of massive worldwide disaster that often comes paired with famine and the breakdown of society. So this is a world where, in some ways, the apocalypse happens again and again. Most of the time they're generally democratic and capitalist, but they have rules set up so that when bad things happen, every community breaks into its own little fiefdom and becomes authoritarian and they kick out anybody they deem useless.

If the actual books are worth reading, because you can't tell the progressive foundation, that is surprising. And I suppose I should have expected it, that Jemisin is one of the "well ackshully I write speculative fiction" types 😁:

INTERVIEWER

In an interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, she eschewed the label of science fiction, and called herself a novelist and a poet instead. Maybe it was just how she was feeling that day, but have you ever felt that the label of science fiction is a pigeonhole?

JEMISIN

No, because it hasn’t been for me. Maybe because I am a black woman, there is an automatic assumption that I am somewhere in the margins of science fiction, in the margins of fantasy, and therefore people from outside of the genre’s margins are a little bit more willing to take a look at me, even though I’m writing solidly science-fiction stuff. But the Broken Earth series has gotten the attention that it has in part because I tend to use literary techniques as well. And that’s just because I don’t care. I’ll use whatever techniques are necessary to get the story across and I read pretty widely. So when people kept saying second person is just not done in science fiction, I was like, well, they said first person wasn’t done in fantasy and I did that with my first novel. I don’t understand the weird marriage to particular techniques and the weird insistence that only certain things can be done in science fiction.

In a lot of cases, people read science fiction and fantasy when they’re younger and then they age out of it. Fantasy in particular. They get tired of the endless Tolkien clones. They get tired stories where an elf, a dwarf, and a halfling walk into a bar. They’re not that bad, but you see the formula and once you’ve seen the formula a couple of times, you get tired of it. There are always people within the genre who are perfectly happy with that formula and they seek out that comfort food every time they read, but a lot of readers move on. I believe at least a few of my literary readers are ex–genre readers who had left, basically in a huff, tired of the formula, and came back because something I’m doing speaks to something they want. There’s a change that’s been happening on a number of different levels. There are more literary-style writers in the genre. There are more writers who are willing to be inclusive, whether they themselves are representative of different races, cultures, ethnicities or not. I may be one of the more visible representatives of it, but I’m not the only one.

INTERVIEWER

What would you say to the people who say they don’t read speculative fiction?

JEMISIN

There are always going to be people out there who are weirdly wedded to their perceptions of a thing and are unwilling to challenge those perceptions. You can’t make them try something new. But Le Guin and all these other excellent writers have had their works out there for fifty-something years. It’s never just been the shallow, limited spaceships-and-ray guns thing. So for anyone who has latched on to the notion that that’s all there is, despite evidence to the contrary, there’s no winning them over. Everybody else, though, is already looking at it. So I’m happy about that.

Le Guin might have said that one day, but when it counted, she came to the defence of genre.

'Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs – somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again – the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics – the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy – although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust – could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem – but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.

won out against greats in the genre like Charles Stross

Wait, what? I'm a big fan of Stross, but if you're trying to avoid woke, he actively does not want your business (and has said as much). His writing credentials include intentionally writing a book with no straight characters because he thought it would be funny to piss off anti-LGBT people.

Looking at the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novel (when Ancillary Justice won)... I enjoyed Neptune's Brood and Parasite but neither were exactly Hugo-bait. And the best series award was added (probably in response to the Wheel of Time nomination?) soon after since awarding a series "best novel" seems weird.

good winners/runners up in recent years are Project Hail Mary

You're one of the people who thought Project Hail Mary was a good book? Nevermind, we'll never agree on literature.

You didn't like Hail Mary? But why man?! The spider people were so cool....

That was sorta the problem with it: there wasn't anything to it past cool things happening. I found it a frustrating read because I thought the premise and worldbuilding were interesting, but plot and characters were awful. The alien is just his immediate perfect ally fully aligned with his goals. Everything the main character tries more or less just works modulo some minor mishaps. Which is an easier sell in the realistic Martian but a harder sell when the author is also writing their own laws of physics that the main character has minimal difficulty with. The Goodreads reviews (filter to 1- or 2-stars) cover plenty of what I disliked about the book in more detail.

I find it interesting that while decrying the woke colonization of speculative fiction awards you still have a very high opinion of The Broken Earth series. The first book, was very obviously good, but books 2 and 3 were flaming dumpster fires. With every POV character in book 2 being boring and predictable(besides the main protag) and book 3's lore of the world having the chance to be great but fell back on being entirely cliché and unoriginal. Book 3 also had an a very predictable ending, no deeper questions asked, its themes only shallowly furrowed. I'm of the opinion that Jemisin won the first award and merit + wokeness and the next two books entirely on woke themes. However I'm super curious why you think they are good if you want to write your thoughts.

Read em a couple years ago so I can't give a really clear summary - mainly just the plot and worldbuilding with the obelisks, how they interact, the final reveal... trying to be vague but damn it was pretty amazing. I didn't find it cliche or unoriginal at all.

Chances are pretty good you're overestimating how male-dominated the audiences for SFF (particularly Fantasy) are, depending on what you mean by 'overwhelming'. Traditionally it's been heavily skewed towards men (upwards of 90% at some points), but the most recent indications I can find are that it is in the vicinity of 60-40 male/female. Reader demographics are changing and preferences with them, along with the general mainstreaming of nerd culture eroding the influence of old school nerds.

If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically.

I'm skeptical of both premises here - that it is impossible to have success without catering to woke sensibilities or that "woke" fiction is categorically worse than "non-woke" fiction. It helps if you want Washington Post Lit columnists to jerk you off ("a group of living avatars who personify New York do battle against an ancient eldritch monstrosity that represents gentrification and white nationalism, with the fate of cities everywhere at stake"), almost everyone including their co-partisans considers these people insufferable. You can find obnoxious ideological pandering and bad writing under any flag (looking at you, Ringo).

Perhaps more to the point, SFF awards have always trended towards the... I hesitate to use the word highbrow. Intellectually aspirational? Look at Hugo Awards from the past decades. You're not going to find the kind of pulpy novels Correia and Torgersen were complaining were overlooked*. Partly this is because SFF awards try to maintain some pretense that they are more than popularity contest, partly because the SFF community seems to have perennial cravings for mainstream respectability.

I can't speak particularly highly of Hugo Award winners in recent years (though I've also never had much regard for them - see the remark above about craving mainstream respectability), but frankly I blame that on the Puppies. The voting base leaned left before, but the backlash against the organized voting block activated a bunch of ideologically motivated left-wing/woke voters who seemed to vote more for authors than for books. Notably, the winners take a sharp downward turn in 2013 (regardless of how good a series might be, I find it faintly ridiculous to award an author multiple times for different installments). Even after that effort petered out, the after-effects on the active voters remained.

*as an aside: I'd also note that these are not really what I'd consider "shape rotator" fiction, for which I would point towards authors like Arthur C. Clarke (or, more recently, Andy Weir). Groggy authors like David Weber occupy something of a middle ground, but they lack the concrete problem solving dimension I associate with shape

When it comes to modern entertainment, science fiction novels especially have been one of the last bastions of male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing. It seems that where the genre goes could be an important bell-weather for the future of the culture war in entertainment.

Probably, but, as mentioned above, not for the reasons you think. Fortunately, writing is a medium with low production costs, especially if you're willing to forgo marketing and rely on digital distribution. There is perhaps no other domain where the exhortation to "start your own" is more credible. In the event that the shape rotators are driven into the outer darkness by the wordcels, they're still going to be able to write novels about bus crashes on the moon.

But frankly, I don't think that's going to happen. White male nerds continue to attain commercial and critical success within the SFF space (just off the top of my head: Alistair Reynolds, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, Miles/Christian Cameron, Franck and Abraham).

The community as a whole, or the subset of the community that runs awards and/or gets MFAs? Yeah, there's always people like Atwood sneering down their nose if anyone dares associate her with "genre," since she's got such a pretentious stick holding her up, but most authors and fans (historically) seemed happy to have their niche and weren't too happy with that attitude.

To be fair to Margaret Atwood, this "sneering" you are referring to is mostly based on her assertion that she writes "speculative fiction," not science fiction, and in context, it may be a little pretentious, but it's not sneering at science fiction as a genre. She claims that she didn't set out to write "science fiction" per se, which in her mind is imagining a fictitious future with nonexisting technologies. She has praised the SF genre often.

SF fans have been mad at her for years about that quote, but I think there's more jealousy and insecurity from the SF community (because Atwood is regarded as "literary") than there is condescension from her.

Well, the use of the term "speculative fiction" is somewhat problematic, as the young people say nowadays, because back in the 60s/70s when the New Wave was riding high, popular writers like J.G. Ballard starting going "No, I don't write science fiction, I write speculative fiction" and wanting to be shelved along with the literary writers not on the SF/genre shelves in book shops.

This was seen as biting the hand that fed them because they had made their bones in SF, by using "speculative fiction" they could hang on to the "SF" label and thus maintain sales to the skiffy fans while getting the ego-stroking of Proper Literary Critics (even if literature sold much more poorly and thus they would never make a living if they relied on Proper Literature sales alone).

Those who tended to go for "speculative fiction", be they critics or authors, were perceived as looking down their noses at the grubby proles of SF, hence why Atwood annoyed some (including me) by writing SF or using standard SF tropes in her writing, then loudly going "no no no it's literature not science fiction" in interviews (granted, she did mellow on that later on).

She claims that she didn't set out to write "science fiction" per se, which in her mind is imagining a fictitious future with nonexisting technologies.

So what the fudge is Oryx and Crake then, Maggie? I do find it tedious when these types go "well ackshully skiffy is about robots and rockets, I don't write about that, so I don't write skiffy, I write Propah Litterachur". Ray Bradbury, may the heavens be his bed, was never one bit ashamed of being a filthy genre writer, even though he wrote across many genres and did film scripts as well, and his science fiction was often of the decidedly "soft" kind, not all robots and rockets (and what the hell is wrong with robots and rockets, anyway?). Even Atwood need not be ashamed of having written Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (if she ever got to write anything as good).

ideological fiction of any sort tends to be worse than that which just wants to tell a good story

Well yes it generally "tends" but that is not a necessity.

Firsly let's not conflate fuzzy set of biases "ideologies" such as wokism with a well defined/scoped opinionated narrarive "ideology".

For example there is deliberate/motivated ideology and even utopism in V for vendetta, the great dictator and black mirror.

I think we live in an era that has a void of ideology, narratives and utopia.

I can imagine many optimistic but insightful rationalist utopia that I would deliberately realize and influence if I was a film maker.

However the world is not rationalist and the wokism and anti workism in modern cinema is pure cancer and I strongly fear the consequences it has on the future allocation of beliefs weights in the worlwide mindshare market.

I think we live in an era that has a void of ideology, narratives and utopia.

That is a bold claim I'd love to see evidence/arguments for, because if true, then it pretty much falsifies, like, this whole community.

then it pretty much falsifies, like, this whole community.

Can you expand on that ?

I am new here so I don't know exactly what you mean and what are the main beliefs of the motte community.

You could mean that a deficit of ideologies in this era would invalidate the motte in general ? Don't think so.

I believe you might have meant that such lack of ideologies would invalidate the notion of culture wars? If so I see what you mean.

So let me constrain my initial statement:

There is no shortage of tribes/groupthink, although some groupthinks have fuzzy/approximate delineations and have not necessarily core identities.

Some tribes do have well scoped ideologies, e.g the feminists/masculinists/egalitarianists.

Some tribes have well scoped beliefs such as flat earthers, but their belief is not an ideology per se, it is not a mindset/mental framework, nor is it a theory that desire to alter society for a "greater good".

Some tribes do have unscoped/universal ideologies though, such as the rationalists/homo logicus.

There is no shortage of beliefs, especially polarizing ones.

One could have thought the advent of the internet would uniformize mankind as in since everyone has easy access to information, people would gradually converge to semi-consensus as to what constitute reality.

There are many explaining factors that explain why people tribalize, polarize and can't assimilate what others says, including cognitive biases, and that is a too rich topic for me to analyze it in this comment.

Fringe theories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_theory) are very interesting as they represent the frontier of science/knowledge.

Some do have key insights or have had scientific value, for example Lysenkoism.

So if we have more than ever, tribes, polarization and fringe theories/beliefs, what did I mean by

I think we live in an era that has a void of ideology, narratives and utopia.

As I implied, here I have a specific meaning for the term ideologies, the keyword being to ones related to utopia.

The salient message I have is a classic and relatable one, that we live in an era of disenchantment.

The previous centuries, despite all their factual horrors, were filled with a high pace of progress and strong ideologies that made people dream of a better future.

For example:

The advent of democracies,

liberalism,

communism,

and socialism.

Regarding the pace of progress, every single metric of quality of life got improved, medecine, education, transports, socialization, etc

After each ideologies came their implementations and with time, their flaws and limitations got revealed to the world.

Nowadays we have a bitter but realistic look at past ideologies, and a deficit of new ideologies to sell a new dream/utopia.

Concomittant to this is an extreme plateau regarding scientific progress. The number of patents and papers each year is increasing fast and has never been that big, and yet the reality is we are constrained by the immutable laws of physics and we hit considerable diminishing returns everywhere.

There are many reasons to be afraid of the future, so many in fact that I can't be exhaustive about it.

Be it climate deregulation, the insane coming scarcity of chemical elements, the escalation of military and economic tensions worlwide and the risk of pandemics or the fact ageing is not considered to be a disease, to say a few.

The other side of the coin is that, yes we live in a modern world that give us a lot of abilities and yet there are fundamental things technology currently doesn't solves.

Humans are not happy enough. Most lives are utterlerly wasted being dysfunctional. That's right everyone has a mental disease, the fact it's not recognized as one by the medical system is irrelevant and does not invalidate the fact we all have it.

For starters, the diagnostic for ADHD is based on magic numbers for the tresholds, I've seen papers showing that with slighly lower thresholds, ADHD can be diagnosed to ~20% of mankind.

But the real disease concern 100% of mankind. We have a lot of time and we spend it ineptly. Humans are victim of hypnosis, a lack of awareness, very deficient memories regarding their qualias, low available memory, low eugeroy, low volition and of a potent hedonic treadmill.

As such humans waste most of their lives.

Again a topic out of scope for this comment.

In addition to this, people suffer from a loneliness epidemic and a recession in friendship relatability and intensity worldwide.

Mankind needs a new ideology, a new utopia.

Not a new sect/religion, not a new unrealistic dream, but an actionable vision that would bring revolutionnary results and hope in this misery.

People wants to feel like Chaplin made them feel https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20

I have theorized a third way, a new power allocation system (a cracy) with results not only in politics but in recommender systems too, as would underdstand the people that ask themselves the right questions. I also have theorized a successor to capitalism. I develop a pragmatic way to AGI with incremental goals, I am the only one to have a precise and complete roadmap to increasing significantly men healthspan and lifespan.

I could go on with my works, why me ? Why if anyone finds a way to disrupts the world will it be me? Because I have not stopped dreaming, and yet I am a true rationalist. Very few people on earth follow simultaneously those two requirements.

Becky Chambers' books, that someone at the old motte described as "nothing happens to a very diverse crowd,"

Not on the old motte, it was kontextmaschine, back in 2015.

If you have any idea about how I can monetize near-perfect recall of who said what and where, I'm all ears ;)

You're not going to find the kind of pulpy novels Correia and Torgersen were complaining were overlooked*.

That's the complaint I never got - to quote Mad Men, "that what the money was for." The other stuff, even if I disagreed, I at least understood why they were upset, even if I thought they were silly, but mid-tier pulp in any genre has never really won awards. But yeah, before most people currently complaining about the state of sci-fi were even alive, sci-fi prizes had gone away from military sci-fi or the type of stuff supposedly being locked out by the SJW's, because it was old hat.

I also think you're right the whole Puppy business not only pushed away a lot of 'centrist' voters to stop getting involved, but activated a whole new group of voters who frankly, saw a bunch of whom they saw as assholes trying to steal awards, and get involved to stop it.

Or that is the accepted take on the Puppies now? "It never happened, and if it did, they deserved it"?

I was very sympathetic to the Sad Puppies because a lot of the modern Hugo stuff really was "how the hell is this SF/Fantasy?" and was being patted on the head simply because it was written by a woman/POC/LGBT author.

What I read back when the Sad Puppies were getting going, is that one particular author/member of the SF community claimed that the WorldCon committee was nudging the scales when nominations/awards were going on, so that they could present a slate of preferred (progressive leaning) authors. The counter-claim was "this is impossible and would never happen", so he set it up to show that not only could it happen under the rules, it was perfectly possible. A slate of non-woke nominees followed, much anger from the WorldCon set, and we're off to the races with the Rabid Puppies (since Vox Day could not resist this chance to make trouble) and then the Sad Puppies, and then the purging and now the new, unchallenged, woke in control Hugos which impeccably nominate and vote for non-white, non-male, LGBT+ authors every time.

The one minor kerfuffle that amused me out of the aftermath was one Bogi Takács who was oppressed, persecuted and vilified by the horrible transphobic monsters in control, because some poor over-worked volunteer doing cut'n'paste bios of finalists slipped up and called em "he" instead of "e". Oh, the humanity! E is of course intersex, agender, trans, disabled, autistic, Jewish-Hungarian who uses Spivak pronouns, all of that is so simple to remember that naturally it couldn't have been a mistake, it had to be deliberate and malicious misgendering. Of course e felt so unsafe and threatened by such acts of villainy, e was not sure ey could attend a pit of vipers like WorldCon 2018:

I would very much appreciate a public apology from @worldcon2018 for rewriting my bio to change my name and my gender.

I have never, ever used "he" pronouns.

After many similar exclusionary actions, this is the last straw, I am honestly not sure I can safely attend.

They wanted this, and they got it, full and plenty. And by God, they deserve it.

Or that is the accepted take on the Puppies now? "It never happened, and if it did, they deserved it"?

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. The nominees prior reflected a left-skewed and "literary" preference. Enter Correia and Torgersen complaining that not enough stuff they like is getting nominated. I missed the part where they claimed the process was rigged, which just makes them look worse because what transpired was the opposite of what you'd expect from a rigged process. Putting together an organized slate successfully got a bunch of their preferred candidates on the ballot, whereas if there were people putting their thumb on the scale behind the scenes that would have failed. What they did do was piss off a lot of people, resulting in people openly organizing against them. Instead of it being vaguely left-inflected, ideological conflict was made explicit. After a couple of years the effort petered out, but left behind their ideologically motivated adversaries. It's not "they deserved it" it's "they catalyzed the process".

I was very sympathetic to the Sad Puppies because a lot of the modern Hugo stuff really was "how the hell is this SF/Fantasy?" and was being patted on the head simply because it was written by a woman/POC/LGBT author.

Can you give examples? Looking at Hugo Best Novel winners from the pre-puppy era, we (going backwards) have: Among Others (female straight white author, primary world fantasy), Blackout (straight white female author, time travel), Windup Girl/City and the City joint winners (both straight white male authors, cyberpunk and social science fiction, respectively), The Graveyard Book (straight white male author, fantasy), The Yiddish Policeman's Union (bi? white male author, alt-history), Rainbow's End (straight white male author, not-really-cyberpunk-but-that's-probably-the-closest-relative), Spin (straight white male author, classic sci fi), Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (straight white female author, historical fantasy). That takes us back to 2005. You can look back further, but I don't think it is going to reveal anything.

As far as I can tell, the "woke" trend in the Hugo Awards started after and in reaction to the Puppies. Hence my remarks above. The only that seems to even come close to the critique is Among Others.

And the sneering that the Puppies were all racist sexist bigots? That didn't happen either and didn't matter?

Irene Gallo, the Creative Director at Tor Books and an Associate Publisher at Tor.com, wrote:

There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.

Ah, right: science fiction is now about social justice, not, you know, science fiction.

My sympathies with the Sad Puppies were not "I think trashy pulp skiffy should win" (though again, trashy pulp skiffy can be just what the doctor ordered at times), it was "Well if I'm a racist sexist bigot for liking this kind of story and not that kind of story where a trans (possibly) non-white (possibly) lesbian (possibly) paleontologist gets beaten up by gin-swilling rednecks for being (I quote) "a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not" because I don't think the latter is quite SF, then I'm a racist etc. etc. etc. because I would prefer to read SF/Fantasy and not poor quality literary magazine rejects".

And the sneering that the Puppies were all racist sexist bigots? That didn't happen either and didn't matter?

Oh, it definitely did. Because a quite a lot of the Puppies were racist, sexist bigots, most prominently Vox Day and his followers. Especially considering that Vox Day was more successful than Correia or Torgersen. If the shoe fits, wear it.

It wasn't the about the not-liking, it was about the vicious backlash to, essentially, two short story nominations.

I was very sympathetic to the Sad Puppies because a lot of the modern Hugo stuff really was "how the hell is this SF/Fantasy?" and was being patted on the head simply because it was written by a woman/POC/LGBT author.

See, the thing about the Puppies is I agreed with them about a lot of the recent winners, but not that therefore "Low-brow pulp action should get Hugos." Like, I'm sorry, but a Hugo was supposed to represent something worthy of becoming a genre classic. I actually enjoy Larry Correia's books, but his writing is strictly derivative action-adventure with no small amount of wish fulfillment. Vox Day is not actually a very good writer (though admittedly his nominations were pure trolling), and Brad Torgerson tries to write in the old classic SF style but he doesn't have the chops for it.

As much as I appreciated the puppies' campaign for its entertainment value, I don't think their tastes in "literature" are any better than the woke cabal's, it just runs in a different lowbrow direction.

See, the thing about the Puppies is I agreed with them about a lot of the recent winners, but not that therefore "Low-brow pulp action should get Hugos."

True, but looking back at 2016 Sad and Rabid Puppies Hugo nominees, ironically one of them is "Ancillary Mercy" by Ann Leckie (low-brow pulp action?). Some of their nominees, I agree, are low-brow pulp and are there mainly as friends/supporters/'up yours' to the opposition, but not all:

Sad Puppies list:

Best Novel

Somewhither – John C Wright

Honor At Stake – Declan Finn

The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass – Jim Butcher

Uprooted – Naomi Novik

A Long Time Until Now – Michael Z Williamson

Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

Son of the Black Sword – Larry Correia

Strands of Sorrow – John Ringo

Nethereal – Brian Niemeier

Ancillary Mercy – Ann Leckie

Rabid Puppies/Vox Day:

Seveneves: A Novel, Neal Stephenson

Golden Son, Pierce Brown

Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm, John C. Wright

The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass, Jim Butcher

Agent of the Imperium, Marc Miller

And seemingly in 2015 the Puppies nominated and voted for The Three-Body Problem but this was bad because it was ideological right-wingism and not because they thought "yeah, this is good hard SF":

GT: Many fans believe that even if The Three-Body Problem had benefited from the “puppies,” it still was deserving of a Hugo Award. Do you agree?

Liu: Deserving is one thing, getting the award is another thing. Many votes went to The Three-Body Problem after Marko Kloos withdrew. That’s something I didn’t want to see. But The Three-Body Problem still would have had a chance to win by a slim margin of a few votes [without the “puppies”].

After the awards, some critics used this – the support right-wing organizations like the “puppies” gave The Three-Body Problem – as an excuse to criticize the win. That frustrated me. The “puppies” severely harmed the credibility of the Hugo Awards. I feel both happy and “unfortunate” to have won this year.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes. I have internally labelled vast swathes of literature as "not for me" and that is perfectly ok. The Hugo awards seems like just one more place that is 'not for me'.

I don't have much to say about the bulk of your post, but I do hope you can find a more enjoyable set of works. There are plenty of up and coming authors writing stuff that could be described as "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing". There are other places you can start looking:

https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing - Shirtaloon, Zogarth, and The First Defier are all people I have read and who would fit that description.

https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/complete - Mother of learning is my favorite. Post Human has AI, sci-fi, aliens, and space battle elements. Royal road in general has lots of fresh authors trying out fun ideas. If you have a tolerance for grammar and spelling mistakes it is full of fiction I think you'd enjoy. If your tolerance is low just stick to the top recommended stories.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/ - Has progressive-ish politics but still produces good recommendations. But mostly the recommendations are the same. Some of the ones I already mentioned get recommended, but also: Cradle, Iron Prince, and Arcane Ascension.

https://old.reddit.com/r/litrpg/ - Common Recs include: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Azarinth Healer, and He Who Fights with Monsters (Shirtaloon)

Amazon - Once you buy enough of the books you like I have found Amazon has a decent algorithim for finding similar books. You need to be deliberate about it, and give star ratings to books, and also remove certain books from your recommendation list.

royalroad

Mother of Learning was great. But some other that I tried were either abandoned or turned into protagonist winning effortlessly because they are protagonist.

Can you recommend anything complete?

(I can recommend https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/45534/this-used-to-be-about-dungeons/ - fantasy slice of life, with some plot. Good characterisation, nice worldbuilding. Nice world, as in "closer to ideal than reality" not some brutal dystopia where everyone is evil and/or stupid)

The section on the website I linked to is only for completed fictions, and the two recs were both completed stories.

Completed stories are not RoyalRoad's strong suite. Typically they have stories with very interesting beginnings and good looooong middles. My approach is to just stop reading them once I get bored with the tropes / writing in the long middles. Usually I'll play "pick my own ending" and just stop reading a story when I feel like it gets to a conclusion and I've started to get bored.

"This Used to be about dungeons" (TUTBAD) was not really for me. But if I had to think three other stories with similar things to what you listed I'd say:

  1. Beneath the dragoneye moons. Slice of life, has more plot than TUTBAD. Lots of characterization, lots of worldbuilding. Most people in the world are nice, even if the setting of the world itself isn't so nice.

  2. Millennial Mage. Slice of life for the first few books. Cool worldbuilding where humans are one of the least powerful species and thus they are all very nice to each other. The other species aren't evil, but more just amoral and don't care about human well-being.

  3. Ar'Kendrithyst. My personal favorite, and perhaps one of my longest going patreon subscriptions. MC is very nice, but thrown into a dangerous and slightly brutal world. He is changed to be more ruthless, but he also changes the world to be a little nicer. Great characterization.

I'll caveat that Ar'Kendrithyst isn't complete, and likely isn't going to be complete for another year or so (if it ends at Book 8). I think you could read Books 1-4, but even going to 1-6 might run into the "winning effortlessly" problem and Book 7 more so.

I think I often don't mind reading the "effortlessly winning" books. Especially if its after a long buildup of power from previous books. The alternate to the effortlessly winning is the perfectly scaling escalator of difficulty. Where somehow the MC only encounters appropriately leveled challenges all throughout the story.

One of my reasons for recommending it is the easiness with which the MC sometimes wins. This matches slice of stories a bit, in that there isn't a ton of tension or strife to hook the reader, and its more of an interest in the world building and characters that keeps you around.

There are stories where the protagonist sometimes wins easily and sometimes gets curbstomped in turn (and to an extent, that's true in Ar'Kendrithyst, cfe Moon Moon), but understood and agreed.

"effortlessly winning" is not a problem by itself, I would be happy to read/watch something about character stomping all over appropriate targets but that is really hard to pull well.

If you liked This Used To Be About Dungeons, you might like other stuff by Alexander Wales, who tends to be well-thought-of in rationalist circles. Probably his best known work is Worth The Candle. Wales' stuff is very well written by many metrics, but he does not write characters that I like, which is fatal as far as I'm concerned.

Royal Road has a number of other stories that I do like, but they are incomplete/in progress/on hiatus. The best thing I've read there is Beware of Chicken, though the first book has moved to Kindle Unlimited and Audible by way of Amazon. A casual knowledge of xianxia/cultivation stories would help, as it's a genre parody, but isn't essential. Very highly recommended.

Strongly anti-recommend Beware of Chicken, it becomes embarrassingly bad after the first book

Seconding Beware of Chicken. It's an innocent pleasure.

Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales is on Royal Road* and it's the best novel I've read in years. A 1,600,000 word rational self-insert litRPG isekai webnovel about a depressed teenager who gets transported from his English class to the magical land of Aerb to face his inner demons come to life with the help of a harem of beautiful girls† sounds like a trainwreck, but Wales's genius turns it into a masterpiece. The setting is vast, logically coherent, and enchantingly interesting, Juniper and Amaryllis are incredibly smart, knowledgeable, and driven, there is a great supporting cast, tons of action with interesting obstacles to overcome, and an amazing ending.

* Though I prefer the AO3 version, since it lets you download an EPUB/MOBI/PDF for your Kindle/Kobo/Nook and read the whole thing in one page.

† Or, as the original description put it, "It's a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, loosely based on my personal experience of falling into a portal to another world and discovering that I had a character sheet attached to my soul."

Unfortunately I have a huge distaste for reading anything that isn't already completed. The vast majority of prog fantasy/litrpg stuff has a long way to go before being finished, if ever. I've been burned too many times in the past to commit to that type of story.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes.

This is a good policy - I could have stood to be less critical, especially since I didn't even read half the book.

Unfortunately I have a huge distaste for reading anything that isn't already completed. The vast majority of prog fantasy/litrpg stuff has a long way to go before being finished, if ever. I've been burned too many times in the past to commit to that type of story.

I thought that might be the case. The link on royalroad I posted only shows Completed fictions. There are also quite a few request threads on progressionFantasy and litrpg subreddits for completed fictions. Mother of Learning is complete, and I'd highly recommend it. Post Human is also complete, and you might enjoy it if you want a different take on AI, empires, and space battles.

I have a personal policy of not really criticizing other authors works. People have lots of different tastes, and sometimes in an effort to appeal to one set of tastes you will have to make it unappealing to another set of tastes.

This is a good policy - I could have stood to be less critical, especially since I didn't even read half the book.

I started the policy when I began writing my own story on royalroad (and yes, I left it unfinished after ~300 pages). I quickly realized how hard it was to please everyone with the story, and I couldn't even please all of my own tastes with the story I was writing. I generally think "more is better" when it comes to fiction and story telling. I want more authors, I want those authors telling more stories, and I want them getting better by just doing tons of writing. I will offer editing help and suggestions if the author asks me, but otherwise I just say what I like to try and encourage more people to write things I like. I'd extend that to you, if you feel there isn't enough "male centric, systematized, shape-rotator style writing" one of the best solutions might be to write your own stories. You have a base level of writing talent that puts you at a better level than many authors on royalroad (you can put together an argument and enough words to make a top level post on themotte). If you have interesting ideas write them. If you don't, just write "fanfiction" and change around some of the things you didn't like in your favorite books.

I've thought about and started trying to write many times. I just don't have the mental energy to do it while juggling a full time job at a startup, partner, clean house, puppy, etc.

In order to do it I stopped moderating at themotte and slatestarcodex, and generally anytime I thought about posting on or reading reddit I spent that time writing instead. Felt good while I was doing it, but yeah I hear you on the mental energy. Its why I haven't been able to do it again.

Spoilers, citizen!

I thought Ancillary Justice was both enjoyable and extremely well-constructed. I semi-disrecommended it a couple months back, but that was purely on aesthetics. It's the kind of book that will raise red flags to a certain kind of reader who happens to be overrepresented on this board.

But first, a little about what I liked.

  • Vast or alien intelligences navigating human society are cool. This is common to lots of books I quite like, such as most anything by Wildbow.

  • Vast or alien empires with aggressively weird structures are also cool. You barely saw any of that until the second half of the book, though.

  • The setting was aggressively authleft and dystopian. More on that later.

  • It played with a few AI and general-intelligence tropes that I was familiar with from my time on /r/rational, but which rarely make it to the mainstream. The most important of these would be value drift and antimemetics, but you didn't get to that part.

  • I found the interleaved chronology to be quite satisfying. You know from the back cover that Justice of Toren One Esk used to "be" a spaceship, but that rightfully elides all the details. More importantly, it doesn't cover the background for why someone might want to betray a spaceship, or what said ship could do about it. The alternating scenes converge on that event in a way I found aesthetically pleasing.

  • There is legitimate characterization. My personal favorite bit was Breq's conclusion when faced with multiple Anaander Mianaais arguing to kill each other.

  • The actual prose was deliciously dense. I suspect this overlaps with what you're calling "confusing." It was genuinely quite fun and immersive for me.

  • I want to write a whole thesis on implied vs. explicit worldbuilding, and how hard it is to do right, but I digress. Suffice to say I found this book technically impressive.

Now for the red flags. Ancillary Justice was obviously part of a Conversation in the SFF community. Yes, the low-hanging fruit would be the (lack of) gender dynamics, since they're quite visible. There were a few passages that were basically a pastiche of Left Hand of Darkness This is not a disqualifier so much as a proud tradition in Thinky Science Fiction, also known as Award Bait. It gives any journalist or reviewer a quick, obvious reference point, and streamlines part of the worldbuilding process by importing a more specific set of cultural assumptions, picking up where LeGuin or Asimov left off. Not coincidentally, that corresponds to a creeping sense of unease in those with a reflexive distaste for Internet leftism.

So instead of being linguistic cultural baggage, carried around even when actively harmful, the pronouns get interpreted as woke pandering. Instead of talking about the bizarre implications of an increasing density of Anaanders as you approach the capital Dyson sphere, people argue over whether various characters were really men. And rather than ask why an author might write her fully automated luxury non-gendered communist empire as a hegemonizing, xenophobic not-so- monoculture...all that matters is whether it fit Vox Day's idea of good sci-fi.

I'll leave you with a couple recommendations.

If you like ship-AI, but want less 2010s politics, less originality, and more HFY: try the Last Angel. Humanity has been subjugated as one of many client races to the Covenant Compact. On a routine mission, one team discovers a drifting hulk which will throw into doubt their overlords' preferred version of history. Yeah, it's Halo without the Flood, and it kicks ass.

If you want something a little bleaker that still deals with transhumanism, space governance, continuity of consciousness, etc., and you don't mind video games, consider Crying Suns. I found its gameplay was good fun; I also enjoyed both the character writing and the overall plot. Or you could just go read Dune again, you cheeky blighter you, since all this branch of sci-fi clearly owes its existence to Frank Herbert. Ancillary Justice is just a little more obtuse about it.

Finally, for those of you who suffered through this whole review thinking Ancillary Justice didn't go far enough, or who would like to see an actual example of unapologetically leftist fiction, just read The Traitor Baru Cormorant.

I'll give a recommend for the Last Angel too, though it's SOOOOOOO SLOW! It's like that gif of a truck constantly accelerating towards but never quite hitting a post, filmed from every angle.

That's not to say that nothing actually happens or that updates aren't frequent. It's good, well-written and interesting but the pacing is arthritic. We still don't know much about the Songeaters after all this time! I thought there were other factions of horrific space entities as well, along with people leaving random space structures around. Someone pointed out that many of the characters know more than the audience does. The Compact's investigation into the father goes on and on, the Triquetrans took so long for their secret to be revealed. It's still not fully revealed, as of the last chapter! And then there are the side-stories, slowing everything down even more.

Also, it seems that sequel is abandoned if I look at forum posts right ( https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.244209/page-96#post-15777617 is from 2014 ).

No, we've moved on to another sequel, The Hungry Stars, updated last month. Spacebattles has an unintuitive thread format.

Can you link it? If you have contact to author - maybe add post mentioning it as a threadmark to the original thread?

Following

I'm too scared to post about it on spacebattles, they're anal about thread necromancy.

These are the sequels, the original is linked above.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-ascension.346640/

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-the-hungry-stars.868549/#post-68912119

Oh, that's good to know. I haven't gotten around to Ascension, yet, but I'll bookmark this for when I cut down my queue.

Aunt Beru, moisture farmer on Tatooine, mother-figure to Luke Skywalker.

Coruscant, shining jewel of the galaxy, city-planet at the heart of trade, and dark home of power and inequity.

Also, a proud tradition of naming ships after birds. Millenium Cormorant?

I read it as a variation on the obvious answer. In-universe, the Radch is its emperors' vanity project, and they subscribe to some level of totalizing xenophobia. The annexations, the citizenship, the ancillaries, the reforms are all serving the interests of Anaander Mianaai.

Out-of-universe, it's because Leckie wrote AJ as an interesting novel, not as agitprop. If she was just going for maximum partisanship, the setting would look very different. I really liked @gemmaem's observation that the author stripped out the two biggest (modern) diversity flags. That puts it more in line with LeGuin or Asimov's approach to political sci-fi.

It is worth noting that Banks' Culture is firmly in that camp, too. FALGC has taken on a life of its own, but Banks spends a lot of time engaging with the Culture as a hegemonic force. At its most extreme, some of the novels are direct allegory to American adventurism. Even in those that aren't, though, the Culture and especially the existence of Contact is pretty unambiguously universalizing.

All this is reminding me of older SF, so Leckie is re-working tropes (deliberately or not? hard to tell). The "AI starship in human body" notion is along the lines of a brainship, a concept I first encountered with Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, but which is even older than that in SF. Flipping it so that it's "AI intelligence in human body" is a variation, sure, but I bet someone has also done it before.

So reading the differing interpretations in the comments, the question seems to be: is Leckie writing the dark side of The Culture, how that society would really be in practice, or does she mean to put forward the progressive elements as separate and admirable and desirable?

It's definitely intentional. Insofar as the book was intended as award bait, yeah, it's winking-and-nudging the LeGuin fans, and probably a dozen other authors besides. That sort of dialogue with existing ideas is...I don't want to say it's the mark of good sci-fi, because there's excellent stuff out there which firmly abstains from referencing what came before. It would be more accurate to say that deployed properly, a conversation with other sci-fi is an efficient worldbuilding tool, and may make the overall premise more engaging to boot.

Personally, I think Leckie started from an interesting premise rather than from a mandatory message. Rumors of its wokeness have been greatly exaggerated. The Radch isn't the Culture any more than it's Dune's Imperium or Endless Space's Horatio. It's a related concept, developed on familiar lines and richly illustrated.

I've loaned Ancillary Justice from a friend but haven't had the time to read it, but the whole pronoun she thing sounds like maximally riggered to make it difficult/impossible to translate to Finnish, a language that doesn't have gendered pronouns as a rule.

It might make it easier - ostensibly the whole reason she has it in is because the Radch empire doesn't have gendered pronouns either. Although I'd be willing to bet it's not actually representative of a culture without pronouns, it's probably just, as you say, maximally riggered to promote social justice ideology.

I wonder if woke people trying to argue the points about pronouns being important have actually studied language like Finnish? I'd be curious to see if there are real differences based on pronoun usage in sexism/equality/etc.

Even Frisian the closest extant language to English lacks gendered pronouns. Proto-Indo European also lacked gendered pronouns. I’ve always wondered why these gender ideologues don’t advocate we just call everyone he.

Because they would consider it an act of submission to the patriarchy, as evidenced by neologisms like "womxn", "herstory", etc.

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I think that adequately describes some conlangs. Esperanto has everything neutral or male, with a suffix -ino for specifically feminine stuff like "mother." I think. It's a point of some controversy for ideological and practical reasons, so I'm not sure I parsed it right.

This made the rounds a couple years back, though I've not looked into it.

More generally, Sapir-Whorf makes a plausible claim (the concepts and demarcations in a language determine how we think) that hasn't held up to scrutiny. With pronouns, I think the fixation on them is because of frustration with failures in addressing material issues. If all we need to build a better world is choosing to use the right incantation of pronouns, that's much more accessible and appealing than "you'll have to do a lot of hard work and will face likely disappointment anyway."

Probably one more of those studies whose conclusions are inflated way beyond their actual effects, and at the end they fail reproduction spectacularly, but not before there are 9000 books written about them and "everybody knows" they are true. I mean, it's possible it is not, but most likely it is.

My Linguistics 101 take on it (I hate categorically dismissing a paper):

It's an okay study in itself; they give subjects a stick figure drawing, and say

“Please use the text boxes below to describe in 3 sentences what the person in the image is doing. Please be as specific as possible and provide as much detail as you can. In your description of this individual, it is important that you use the pronouns ‘[he/she/they]’ and ‘[his/her/their].’ This will help to standardize the accounts provided by all participants in this survey, which will make them easier to interpret.”

with each individual receiving a version with one of masculine/female/neutral pronouns (except in Swedish, with they/their being a new pronoun recently introduced by the government).

They then poll subjects on several political topics, and those primed with different pronouns show meaningfully different results. My main complaint here is around social desirability bias, as the prompt makes it pretty obvious the object of study here. They attempt to rule it out by measuring reaction times, but I don't find that particularly compelling. It's also weird that the results they find go beyond salience (e.g. increased recall of female politicians) to a wide range of issues ("profemale preferences"), as there's no suggested short-term mechanism that would do this. I don't think that compelled use of pronouns would make people immediately switch their votes from Trump to Clinton or move from opposition to support of gay marriage and abortion, and they only discuss salience because that's the only part they have a plausible mechanism for. The exceptionally broad result suggests they're not measuring what they think they're measuring, and social desirability fits better than increased adherence to progressive principles.

The broader issue is what you point out: who knows if the study will replicate. If a hundred grad students attempt to, we'll get five papers saying it does replicate, none saying it doesn't, and a thousand articles in the popular media saying it does. Other things (like the known issues with Sapir-Whorf-style linguistic determinism that should make us skeptical of the result) will never be mentioned as important context for the results.

Well we have also the story of the priming work which was hyped to the high heavens and then turned out to be exaggerated, largely non-replicable and looking like Wikipedia's "list of research fallacies". That does not inspire too much confidence in similar approaches.

(spoken) Chinese

Historically, too. The “she” equivalent (same as “he”, except trade the person radical for the woman radical) was a character repurposed as a pronoun to ape European languages that did have gendered pronouns. This happened barely more than a hundred years ago.

AFAIK, the kind of grammatical gender familiar to speakers of European language (he/she/sometimes it) is a peculiarity of Indo-European (Hindi, Farsi, European languages except Basque, Finnish and Hungarian) and Afro-Asiatic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) languages. Most languages of other families either have very different "gender" classes (e.g. the prefix system of Swahili, the noun classes based on shape and appearance in Navajo) or none at all.

As a big fan of scifi and an aspiring writer myself, I feel the need to point out that a lot of "classic" scifi that won awards is actually probably much worse than this. A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development. It was often a vehicle for a concept more than a story. The only modern scifi writer who gets away with that now is the "three body problem" author, Liu Cixin. Outside of his original book, the three body problem, which is a masterpiece, his other books are total dumpster fires. (EDIT:I probably shouldn't have said the only one, but having a good concept and nothing else and finding success is rare now)

So you may be right about this book (I havent read it) but your insinuation that writers couldn't have gotten away with this poor quality in the past is definitely wrong. In the past scifi novels catered to young men with little exposure to good writing, and it showed.

A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development.

This makes it good. Not all literature needs to have the same characteristics, character development can be good in scifi but I don't think it's actually required in the same way it is in other genres. You don't need character development in the foundation series because the characters are stand ins for massive crushing historical trends. I adore the destiny's crucible series knowing the writing is sub par and the characters he's decided to transplant from modern day to a pre-industrial world are... suspicious because the concept carries the story. If the author is also a great writer with interesting characters that's a plus but when looking for a scifi novel, at least for me, it's concept first.

Concept is useful but there is no reason not to add solid writing to a concept. It's very hard to care about "crushing historical trends" when you just don't care about any individuals. That's just how people work. Even history is much more interesting through the lense of a Hannibal, Thutmoses III, or Joan of Arc.

That's just how people work.

You haven't provided evidence for assertion. More importantly, even you did, ad populum is a logical fallacy thus not proving the benefits of "character development". Personally, I care more about worldbuilding, than deeply written characters experiencing roller coasters of emotion.

Concept is useful but there is no reason not to add solid writing to a concept. It's very hard to care about "crushing historical trends" when you just don't care about any individuals.

I did not find this hard at all. The idea of the religious atomics cult using their monopoly on atomics and obfuscating how they work through rituals that are half pointless was fascinating. That the only name I remember from the series is Hari Seldon takes nothing away from the experience to me. I can't say I care at all what was going on in the personal life of the head priest, it's totally unrelated to the central thesis and leaving it out is great time saving. If you have something interesting to say about how these happening impact relationships, sure, say it. But if the world is going to be mainly populated by the kind of people I already know in the real world then what's the point? You're just going to get another awful forced romance to prove that love exists in every universe, blegh.

That's just how people work. Even history is much more interesting through the lense of a Hannibal, Thutmoses III, or Joan of Arc.

Perhaps we're typical minding each other, I absolutely don't think this is true.

A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development.

IMO that isn't really worthy of much criticism. Character development is icing, not the cake. You can have a good story with a good plot and bad characters, but not vice versa.

Eh, it all matters. Sure, character development is more "icing" but the characters themselves are crucial. A bad character can ruin a story. Decisions that make no sense are just as much plot holes as any other inconsistency.

I would not agree that the characters themselves are crucial. Look at the Foundation stories by Asimov. The characters are paper thin, but those stories are still wonderful. If I were going to try to formulate a rule, it would be something like: your characters don't have to be detailed, as long as they are still plausible in their actions.

I agree. Of the big three: Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein - Heinlein is the only one I enjoy, and he definitely wrote some stinkers. Asimov and Clarke write grand ideas, but their prose is dry and their characters are cardboard. For some people, Big Dumb Objects in space or Big Galactic Empires are enough, but I've never found them that interesting.

(I will admit I liked Asimov's I, Robot as a kid, though.)

Most sci fi conceptual stories would be best told as a short story; The Egg is great, despite having only a single flat character. Foundation I enjoyed a lot as kid but will never read again; adding rich characters would detract heavily from their impact, which is why e.g. the television adaption was terrible.

(On the other hand, 2001 was a great movie, better than the book.)

A lot of stuff by early guys like Asimov is incredibly dry and has no character development.

So you've never read "The Bicentennial Man"?

Asimov was known for his spare writing style, of course. The "no character development" thing is also usually tossed at him. The problem with the claim is twofold. One, it's usually referring to the short stories. Well, there's only so much room in short stories. Two, it generally ignores the characters of the robots.

What little truth remains after those considerations goes back to the two conceptions of the novel championed (respectively) by Henry James and H.G. Wells, the novel of character and the novel of incident. James prevailed and the novel of character became "mainstream literature". It's not reasonable to expect science fiction -- which descends largely from Wells -- to follow the conventions of mainstream literature; if it did it wouldn't be science fiction.

Are the novels which win sci-fi awards the sci-fi novels which sell? It doesn’t seem like they are- Orson Scott card, David Weber, and John Ringo are not writing particularly woke novels and they seem to top the sales charts for speculative fiction most of the time.

Orson Scott Card very famously won back-to-back Hugos.

I have it on good report that Orson Scott Card is Problematic and should be shunned 🙄 I may be one of the ten people alive on the Earth who have never read "Ender's Game" (though even I have read excerpts and snippets) but even so, I would judge the guy on his writing not on his opinion about transgenderism.

It was gay marriage that got Card his reputation. He was staunchly against it during the (second) Bush administration. By the time transgenderism became relevant, he'd been sufficiently chastened to keep his opinions to himself.

And I do judge him on his writing. His two Hugos were will deserved and some of the best books I've ever read.

When the dinosaurs roamed the earth (1985 and 1986)

No the system was pretty riggable (the whole point of the alternate Rabid Puppy campaign) so they became about things that pleased an influential clique who wanted the awards to be more like literature awards.

David Weber

The two big series he's written are a gender-swapped Horatio Hornblower in space and a transgender android overthrowing fundamentalist religious fanatics. You'd think he'd be swimming in feminist awards.

Haven't looked into the numbers here (not sure where you would find them) but in general, speculative fiction is an extremely competitive and difficult market to break into. Sure, authors who have already proven themselves like the ones you mentioned won't have sales issues. The problem is if awards promote authors like Ann Leckie, then other authors who write better fiction but we have never heard of will lose out.

As I mentioned, it's a zero-sum game. Also, marketing these types of novels doesn't work extremely well as it's a bit of a niche genre. So the main way books gain notoriety is by word of mouth, and the few awards out there. Winning a Hugo is a massive leg up, I'd be curious how you could make a real argument that it isn't.

This is also what was grating for me in Ancillary Justice - I get how the (ex)AI may be weak on the concept of gender, and how its (her?) default may be stuck on female. That's understandable. But a small child learns to grasp that concept - and how to use it - within rather short time. Breq is clearly aware (it was stated in the text, as I remember) that genders exist, and that gendered languages - including some she is using - exist, and that some of the people she is talking about are male (she may be unaware initially, but it's not after repeated encounters) and there is a proper way to address them in that language. Yet she keeps applying "she" to them as some kind of obsessive tick. That breaks the immersion. At least such a major flaw should be somehow addressed.

In general, the first part itself looked average for me. Some of the ideas and depiction of Raadch, its philosophy and the consequences of its multiple-personalities setup are well done, but the style and the pace didn't really work for me that well, and I couldn't really feel anything for the protagonist. Didn't try the other parts for this reason.

If aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy can't make it without catering to woke sensibilities, then unfortunately the quality of the genre will drop drastically

I expect this is exactly what is going to happen. Likely already happening. Alas.

My Chinese ex, despite living in the US for over two years and speaking English everyday, frequently would confuse she / he and use the wrong pronoun in conversation because Chinese doesn’t really have gendered pronouns.

If a real life human has issues with it why wouldn’t an alien?

Two years is not that much, and it's one thing to occasionally make a mistake, and another to consistently use the wrong one while knowing it's wrong.

I thought it was just Breq not caring about learning other pronouns or gender concepts than Radch female pronouns. Which was character building: Breq is fully-immersed chauvinist partisan for Radch totalitarianism.

By the time we meet her she's anything but, I think.

Yet she keeps applying "she" to them as some kind of obsessive tick.

Maybe hard-wired in, if all the commentary about scooping out bits of brain to fit in all the cybertech is correct? Can't be corrected/reprogrammed without access to the fancy AI starship tech which she currently doesn't have. And/or it is an obsessive tic, the human brain is damaged, this is like Tourettes Syndrome.

Breq is clearly aware (it was stated in the text, as I remember) that genders exist, and that gendered languages - including some she is using - exist, and that some of the people she is talking about are male (she may be unaware initially, but it's not after repeated encounters) and there is a proper way to address them in that language. Yet she keeps applying "she" to them as some kind of obsessive tick. That breaks the immersion. At least such a major flaw should be somehow addressed.

Yep this is a great overview of my thoughts. The immersion was just broken when this supposedly brilliant AI who's existed for thousands of years makes such a basic mistake over and over - with no explanation as to why that's happening.

I liked Ancillary Justice. The premise is fun once you know what the author is doing. The ship can't properly identify as a human and understand gender distinctions for the same reason the empire folks (or whatever they were called) couldn't understand the native culture of the swamp planet enough to anticipate the brewing shitshow there. And why the ship didn't initially understand the plot. That disinterested misunderstanding was a big theme in the book.

This strikes me as like saying "well, it has evil Jewish bankers in it because that's part of the premise". The premise was created by an author, and premises with some in-story backing can still be created in a contrived way for political reasons.

"The AI just happens to misunderstand gender in a way which just happens to let the story appeal to real world social justice advocates, but that's purely worldbuilding, and has nothing to do with actual social justice advocates" seems like an unlikely scenario. There's a long tradition of sci-fi using proof by fictional evidence to have aliens (or in this case AIs) come to the humans and say how from their objective alien viewpoint untainted by human biases, some difference between humans which humans care about just isn't very important. Even evil aliens or AIs often do this. Is the AI actually shown to be wrong, in a strong enough way that this is not what's happening?

The (bad colonizing meat-robot-creating) culture that has practically no gender is shown in a pretty unsympathetic light whereas the one with a concept of gender is shown in a more sympathetic light.

It's often villains who do the "look objectively at human society" thing. There are a number of variations: the villain's only motivated by base motives so he doesn't care about complex human distinctions; the villain's outside society so human distinctions don't matter; the villain's naive and can't be tricked by human sophistry surrounding distinctions because he doesn't understand it.

The question isn't really "is the no-gender AI evil" or "does not understanding gender have negative consequences", it's whether the narrative treats it as a deficiency which makes it less than human, as if it couldn't understand grief or it had no appreciation of poetry.

I would say that it's treated as a deficiency, but not a dehumanizing one. In fact, the AI is one of the most human characters in the story, despite it's initial attempts to be above such things.

The irony is that both hardcore SJ crowd and anti-SJs miss any such implications.

I didn't hate Ancillary Justice - I finished it and thought it was okay, but the agendered/she-pronouns things just seemed like a gimmick meant to say "Look at me, Hugo voters!" The debut novel rough edges and one-note gimmick plus the fact the Anne Leckie has joined the ranks of pretentious twats like N. K. Jemisin and John Scalzi whom I will no longer read out of spite, even though I have enjoyed some of their work, prevented me from finishing the series.

That said, there is still plenty of non-woke fiction being published, but it's mostly either from veterans who pretty much stay off of Twitter and don't get in these stupid online fights, or indie authors. (I used to turn my nose up at self-published/"indie published" books, and the vast majority of it is still pretty crap, but it's actually becoming a viable alternative career path for some authors.)

I think you are overstating the degree to which awards and recognition from the online woke crowd actually matters to marketability. Yeah, a Hugo Award probably boosts sales, but other than that, most of the book-buying audience is really not that aware of the stuff that looms large to those of us too embedded in the culture war. And writing fiction has always been a brutal career that few succeed at.

If you went by online discourse, JK Rowling is now the most hated author in existence, her career and reputation in shambles, and no decent person will ever buy her books again. The reality is that she's still beloved worldwide and her Cormoran Strike novels still hit the bestseller lists.

I didn't hate Ancillary Justice - I finished it and thought it was okay, but the agendered/she-pronouns things just seemed like a gimmick meant to say "Look at me, Hugo voters!"

Fair, as I mentioned I only read 20% and bailed out. I probably judged it too harshly since I didn't finish it, but the premise and worldbuilding were just not to my taste. I can see it getting better for people that were more patient.

That said, there is still plenty of non-woke fiction being published, but it's mostly either from veterans who pretty much stay off of Twitter and don't get in these stupid online fights, or indie authors.

Discoverability is still extremely tough in speculative fiction novels. I've been trying for years to find consistent lists of good fiction that I enjoy, and haven't found any solid methods besides dredging through tons and tons of series. If you have any good pointers or lists let me know!

I agree that indie/self published novels have had some shining stars, like the Licanius trilogy I mentioned earlier, or Mother of Learning. (I don't know of any good SF self published stuff). Ideally though, indie would be less useful as a category because publishers/magazines/awards would sort out quality writing, and good indie authors would get snapped up quickly.

Unfortunately we don't live in that world, and instead of the overall quality of the established media's (what you call the 'online woke crowd') picks have gone down. I'd argue that the Hugo awards matter quite a bit to an already niche genre.

If you went by online discourse, JK Rowling is now the most hated author in existence

I want to say she's the "exception that proves the rule," but not sure that's any sort of legit principle. Either way, as you mention writing fiction is brutal. I would expect that cancellation and the generally pull from the left would be far more important to the majority of writers, already living on the edge of profitability as it is. Sure a few make it big and can afford to piss off the left crowd, but I'd imagine there are hundreds, if not thousands, of authors that gave up or quit because they weren't in line enough with social justice viewpoints to make a livable career out of their craft.

Bailing out is legitimate, I gave up on it within 10 minutes. If it doesn't engage me quickly, I move on.

I think you are overstating the degree to which awards and recognition from the online woke crowd actually matters to marketability. Yeah, a Hugo Award probably boosts sales, but other than that, most of the book-buying audience is really not that aware of the stuff that looms large to those of us too embedded in the culture war. And writing fiction has always been a brutal career that few succeed at.

FWIW, I have an unstarted copy of Ancillary Justice that I picked up for $1.97 from the outdoor clearance racks at Books-A-Million.

It's the best way to acquire books, especially if you aren't sure when you'll read them.

Oh gosh, I used to see "Hugo Award winner" or "nominee" on the cover of a book and think "Okay, this must be worth giving it a go". Now I see it and go "Ah yes, woke crap that I needn't waste my time on".

I may be missing really good writing because of this, but I've been burned one time too many.

This is because, as the author takes pain to remind us, the Radch Empire which she came from has one singular gender (or doesn't care about gender, it isn't clear) and the default pronoun is 'she.' This odd convention leads to such beautiful passages as (emphasis mine):

Can you really call it misgendering if you don't believe in the rules other people go by? I haven't read this novel, so I'll ask you if there's any dialogue at any point where both sides taboo their words.

Well, the people who don’t believe in the whole trans thing get accused of misgendering for not believing in the rules over people go by.

Yeah, I get that. But the question is whether we should qualify it as misgendering, not what others say.

Can you really call it misgendering if you don't believe in the rules other people go by?

This is the first time I've heard of this being a prerequisite for something being misgendering. My belief was that the people who accuse others of misgendering don't care if the person they're accusing don't believe in the same rules about what differentiates a "he" from a "she." Is there more to it than that?

I can't really tell you, since I don't subscribe to the view that the outcome of an action always casts the action as moral or immoral.

Eh, it's more like the AI doesn't believe in or understand misgendering because in their society, the idea is totally alien. There's only one gender.

Problem is she's on a backwater, prejudiced planet. So the locals, who have a different conception of gender than her, try to kill her if she misgenders them. Even if the character doesn't believe the rules other people go by, they have serious consequences in this setting.

I loved Ancillary Justice. It did not deserve to get dragged through the mud just because some people were mean to Larry Correia on the internet. It certainly starts out quite opaque, but it rewards attentive reading.

Given the publicity surrounding its use of feminine pronouns for every character, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a book about gender. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is really a book that is not about gender. The Imperial Radch is a deeply flawed society with a great deal of systemic injustice -- and it doesn't have gender (as we understand it) and it doesn't have race (as we understand it). So it's a book about systemic injustice that has very carefully excised the main two identity markers that we usually associate with that sort of thing. It takes away the compass that the average social justice advocate would use, and asks readers to learn to navigate anew.

I thought the body horror aspects were excellently handled, creeping up on the reader precisely because they are so normal to the narrator. I also found Anaander Mianaai's troubles with herself to be predictable in the manner of a successful Chekhov's gun -- the sort of thing where you ask "but what if..." partway through the book and then learn later (to great readerly satisfaction) that, indeed, if. On the whole, there is a general theme of throwing the reader into the deep end of some massive cultural and technological differences. If you enjoy subtle clues and tricky empathy leaps, it's a really good book.

Perhaps I was too harsh to the book, I think the huge praise it got and the relatively flat beginning threw me for a loop. I only finished about a fifth before setting it down.

On the whole, there is a general theme of throwing the reader into the deep end of some massive cultural and technological differences. If you enjoy subtle clues and tricky empathy leaps, it's a really good book.

I'm actually pretty okay with getting thrown into the deep end of a world, Malazan Book of the Fallen is my favorite speculative fiction series by far. If I had to pinpoint it, I'd say my main issue is that the world doesn't seem to make sense from a technical perspective, for instance the massive tech difference between the Radch and the Nilk, and the whole AI needing human bodies thing. I suppose it could be explained away as social issues, but I am generally pretty skeptical of galaxy spanning civilizations with godlike technology still having colonies where people have to perform a ton of manual labor, and have little to no real infrastructure.

Well, the tech difference is at least partly because this is an empire that conquers first and develops later, right? It's located somewhere in the same space as colonial Britain or ancient Rome. Conquest is definitely the main idea, and then assimilating the conquered peoples into your high tech, highly "cultured" society is also important, because that's how you keep the empire stable, but it takes longer.

I never really thought about the conditions that would lead to the usefulness of human ancillaries, I have to admit. I mostly took that part for granted. Some of the ships/AIs do have discussions later on about the relative merits of humans and robots, and they seem to subjectively prefer the former, possibly because the former has subjectivity. I don't really remember if the whole thing was actually explained in any depth, though, and I can see it being something that varies in plausibility depending on the reader. I guess that's true of a lot of world-building, in that there are always going to be things that work better for some people than others.

Well, the tech difference is at least partly because this is an empire that conquers first and develops later, right? It's located somewhere in the same space as colonial Britain or ancient Rome.

I more meant the Radch people on these backwaters (and in Ors). They have no implants, no real changes in their day to day tech (like phones/VR/AR type deal). It boggles the mind that after many millenia and conquering an entire galaxy, the military upper crust of this society is just like... a 21st century human. Totally breaks immersion for me.

Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga is a great explanation of how to do this better. Also Gravity Dreams by L.E. Modesitt jr.

I never really thought about the conditions that would lead to the usefulness of human ancillaries, I have to admit. I mostly took that part for granted.

This is probably where I diverge most from what other people are saying about the book. It is so far beyond what I consider realistic it's basically a deal breaker unless it's addressed early and well.

I think 2010 was the last year when I could just pick a Hugo or Nebula award winner and expect to like it. I've marked potential diversity quota winners with italics:

  • 2011: Blackout/All Clear - tried it, didn't like it.

  • 2012: Among Others

  • 2013:

    • Redshirts

    • 2312

  • 2014: Ancillary Justice

  • 2015:

    • The Three-Body Problem - tried it, liked it

    • Annihilation

  • 2017:

    • The Fifth Season

    • All the Birds in the Sky

  • 2018: The Stone Sky

  • 2019: The Calculating Stars - tried it, hated it

  • 2020:

    • A Memory Called Empire (does using a male-presenting pen name make you exempt from being a diversity laureate?)

    • A Song for a New Day

  • 2021: Network Effect

  • 2022:

    • A Desolation Called Peace

    • A Master of Djinn

Does anyone have any disrecommendations before I pull the plug and try to read all of them to form an opinion based on personal impressions?

There was a series of posts on this topic going into the various slates and "puppies?" in the old world. I'm not sure if they made it into the vault. But yes, the Hugos are practically useless these days. I have taken to looking at other writers that the audiobook voice actor for books I've enjoyed also voices because I think they basically follow tastes.

I'd be curious to read those if you happen to stumble across them. I've never been able to get into audiobooks, but sounds like a decent way to discover good novels.

I tend to go through reddit lists and/or look through goodreads and amazon 'readers also enjoyed xyz.' I've built up a pretty long list over the years of to-read stuff luckily, so I don't have to browse too often. This series has been on my list for a while, glad to strike it off.

No, you are wrong. Ancillary justice is great.

To address a few of your points:

The AIs don't "need" to take over humans, they do it to create perfect AI controlled meat puppet servants for the officer cadres aboard the ships, as non human servants is just low class.

The AI human main character is just a fragment of the actual AI, and due to having loads of bits of brain scooped out to fit in the cyberaugmetics for communication and integration with the AI is basically a weird techno autist. The AI was also not a god AI like a culture mind. What is left is essentially a fusion of a small part of the AI fused with the lobotomised remnants of the original human.

They all use she pronouns not as an endorsement of woke, but as their culture is a slave owning, world conquering, plantation building, mass murdering, genocidal, xenophobic, feudal caste based imperium of polite nazis in space who like to drink tea and wear fine clothes (edit I forgot the end of this bit, so they use one pronoun for eveyone as that is their culture and they literally force it on everyone else, who doesn't get slave lobotomised or killed in their invasiom that is). The language fuckups are the shattered remnants of the AI and lobotomised human autistically struggling to not to act like they have done for their whole life, that is like a conquering army backed up by reams of orbital dakka, ready to genocide the natives if they don't like how things are done now.

It is to my read a praise of autocratic caste based society, while also holding up a dark mirror on how the elements of a woke worldview (pronouns) are intrinsically alienating to humans and flow only from a conquering army backed by the righteousness power of the gun barrel and little else, while being natural only to literal autistic meat puppets lobotomised to act as servants for their caste betters. It is easy to view it as an extreme criticism of wokeness.

The AIs don't "need" to take over humans, they do it to create perfect AI controlled meat puppet servants for the officer cadres aboard the ships, as non human servants is just low class.

The AI human main character is just a fragment of the actual AI, and due to having loads of bits of brain scooped out to fit in the cyberaugmetics for communication and integration with the AI is basically a weird techno autist.

This is basically what I assumed the author was trying to get at - but the beginning was far too slow paced and uninteresting to keep me hooked until this was made explicit. I think she either needed to hook people earlier, or address this explicitly. As I've mentioned elsewhere though I had too much heat in this post and not enough light.

Fwiw, I thoroughly enjoyed that series. It was an interesting story with pretty cool concepts, and made me think a lot.

I’m no wokist, but I’m not as bothered by it as most people here. The one pronoun device seemed just totally plausible to me. A big concept of sci-fi is exploring alien culture, and it doesn’t seem that weird that you’d have a culture that doesn’t use gendered pronouns. Looks like there’s some in real life even, like Hungarian.

The AI used humans as slaves to provide a better interface to it for its captains. IIRC robotics were just a lot more expensive, so the ships ~never used them.

You literally have characters introduced using female pronouns, only to find out two chapters later that it was actually a male character, the former-AI-turned-SJW just failed to correctly gender them!

I heard of the Ancillary Justice series but never bothered with it. This part here is old news, or at least Samuel Delany did it back in 1984 with this novel, and more interestingly; by the use of "she" you do find yourself unconsciously attributing characteristics to people that you know nothing else about (the name is not gendered in a typically male or female style so you have no clue as to their biological sex) and it does make a difference about whether you think so-and-so was a man or a woman:

In Morgre, every person, including evelmi, is labelled a woman and the use of the pronouns ‘she/her’ are most common. For those of whom one finds to be sexually desirable, one uses the pronouns ‘he/him’. When Korga remarks that on Rhyanon, people spoke of both women and men, Marq replies, 'I know the word "man"...It's an archaic term. Sometimes you'll read over it in some old piece or other.'

Sounds like Ms. Leckie is either copying a better writer, or thinks she has invented it all from new.


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