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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.

Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.

But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.

This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.

Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.

(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)

If you're this skeptical then I don't understand why you would say 'gender identity' exists at all.

Given the current controversy over the game Hogwarts Legacy because of J.K. Rowling and trans issues, that thing that never happens just happened again. Even better, and to show that reality is indeed stranger than fiction, there's a J.K. Rowling connection:

A 53-year-old crossdressing butcher has been arrested in connection with the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl in the Galashiels area of Scotland.

...Earlier today, Police Scotland announced the child had been found safe and uninjured after having been missing for approximately 27 hours. She has since been reunited with her family. Police have cordoned off the property where she was found in Montgomerie Terrace in the village of Gattonside, and announced they had arrested a man in connection with the girl’s disappearance.

Local sources have named the individual arrested as Andrew Miller, a local butcher. One anonymous source from the community passed on to Reduxx that Miller was known in the area as a “crossdresser.”

Miller is the owner of Miller Butchers of Melrose, a poorly-rated meat shop which recently shut down. The shop, however, was briefly mentioned in a JK Rowling crime novel published under her pen name “Robert Galbraith.” Miller Butchers of Melrose briefly displayed the short excerpt from Career of Evil in the shop’s window, along with a framed photo of Rowling. It is unknown when the display was removed.

I have no idea if there will be another attempt to "No True Scotsman" this person as "not really trans" (and believe me, the irony that all this is happening in Scotland is not lost on me) particularly since it involves a missing child - an eleven year old girl - but if we are to blame "predatory men" who are not really trans, then how do we distinguish the "really trans" people, given that the origin stories are so similar? Whether or not the rapist 'Isla Bryson' is really trans or just pretending, he (if that is the correct term) seems to have learned off the correct origin story to tell: knew he was trans since he was four, never had the confidence to transition until in his late twenties, all the rest of it.

This new case of Andrew Miller/Amy George, who seems to have operated online identities as both male and female, can't be tidied away under the carpet because okay, he came out late in life - like other trans people. If "you're trans if you say you're trans" is the approach recommended, then how do we distinguish "okay, this person claiming to be trans is just faking it", especially since (as I have said before) years back we were told "no guy is ever going to pretend to be a woman in order just to get into women's spaces, it's too costly".

Looks like some guys are indeed pretending, unless this is just a lurid tabloid story:

Campaigners have called into question the Scottish Prison Service's (SPS) policy of allowing male prisoners to "self-id" as women in order to be put into a female-only prison.

Their concern has come after new research suggested that men who changed their gender to female in jail are switching back to their birth gender after release.

A study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, also revealed that some of these prisoners may only have identified as women in order to have sex with female inmates.

If you read the study it's somewhat more complicated and complex than that, but certainly some women prisoners have had bad experiences with transgender prisoners.

What's my point? I don't know if I have one; certainly my position on transgender rights/activism has hardened a lot, given the go-to accusations of being a TERF if you have the slightest qualms about putting male-bodied people into spaces with female-bodied people; the crying about 'medical gatekeeping' which did sound reasonable because of the way earlier psychiatrists did place demands on transgender patients but, with cases like the above, is now sounding more and more like a demand that cannot and should not be met that there should be no medical certification or barrier to getting puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery; and the exaggerations about 'literally killing me and my friends' and trans genocide

At this point it's less that the game is transphobic, cause really it's not the key issue. The creator is, and funding her campaign of genocide is wrong. However the game itself is full of antisemitic tropes and slavery apologia, which is what people should be concerned about.

I've heard of "systemic racism", is "systemic genocide" a thing now? "No we don't mean Rowling is literally building death camps and rounding up trans people to put them in those places, but she is guilty of wrongthink which is the same thing in essence"?

Whatever good will ordinary people had, I think extreme cases like this, which should never have been entertained but were in order to pander to loud screeching activists with accommodations and humouring them, are burning it all up, and the ordinary trans person who isn't a sex offender or a fetishist is going to be lumped in with these types and life will be harder than it needs to be for them.

I'm pretty sure this guy was a Fullmetal Alchemist character

Okay, but what’s that got to do with the price of tea in china?

The OP isn’t arguing it “never happens,” nor is he pointing out exploits or corner cases. He’s not connecting it to JKR or genocide or basically anything that you wrote about. And it wouldn’t make sense if he did, because Blanchard et al. never really come into those discussions!

I feel like you’re looking for a place to drop a rant about the latest atrocity. I don’t feel like it makes sense down here. Just do a top-level.

Okay, but what’s that got to do with the price of tea in china?

Are these two examples "real" transgender women or not?

If not, why not?

If they're men acting as/pretending to be women, why?

Is Blanchard/Bailey typography correct and some people do get sexual gratification out of 'becoming' women, and is that what is happening in these cases?

Because we're left with the sticky problem of "what is transgender anyway, what does it mean to 'feel like a woman', and if you do away with 'medical gatekeeping' how do you distinguish genuine transgender from pretence, fetish, or some other disorder?"

Where is the line dividing "living the part so long you come to believe it's true" versus "kids as young as two can know for sure they're trans"?

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