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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
The trans thing was politically useful because it showcased the most extreme, least defensible positions on the progressive side (like that even biological sex was fake) during peak woke that had very low mainstream public approval. In a way, it was similar to eg factions on the academic far-left being sympathetic to extreme sexual deviancy in the late 1970s, which was also useful for the right at the time leading into the comparative backlash in the 1980s.
Today it feels like we’re no longer even close to that level. Yes, progressive wine moms and aunts are still very pro-trans, that’s true. But even the NYT is now no longer as zealous about the topic as it once was, and the whole right is in agreement. It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.
And yet every time a Democratic official appears in front of congress, they are reliably stumped by the "what's a woman" question. The "trans thing" is still strong enough to demand the slavish allegiance of every single elected and appointed dem in the country, apart from Fetterman. It still runs every university, major corporation and media organization. They're being a bit quieter about it, they aren't pushing the maximalist stuff as hard, but that's a temporary thing. This is a religious invocation of faith, and it won't be dropped for some time, if ever.
And thousands, perhaps millions, are reliably stumped by the "is a hotdog a sandwich" question, because most people still think of words as living in the Platonic Realm Of Forms rather than being pointers to fuzzy-edged categories. (I am once again asking you to Read the Sequences.)
Bad analogy. The question "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a query about whether an edge case falls inside a category. In the sex/gender debate, equivalent questions might include "is an emasculated male with breast implants a woman?" or "is a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome a woman?"
It's also a bad analogy because nothing actually hinges on the question of whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Quite a lot does hinge on the question "what is a woman?"
The third reason it's a bad analogy is because "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a question which inspires disagreement, but which no one feels the least bit of discomfort about answering, and will be happy to present arguments for or against ("it's a piece of meat surrounded by bread, so it's a sandwich!" "but it's only one piece of bread, while a sandwich has two pieces!"). By contrast, among progressives the stock response to the question "what is a woman?" is a sputtering refusal to answer, usually attempting to dodge it by changing the subject ("I'm not a biologist", "I take care of people with many different identities"). This is not because it's a complicated question, but because progressives know that one answer ("an adult human female") will anger woke people, while the other answer ("anyone who identifies as one") will make them look like a lunatic.
...until some arcane point of tax or tariff law depends on it (this was why the Supreme Court had to weigh in on whether a tomato is a fruit), and the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe converge on different answers.
Again, that might be different if progressives had read the Sequences.
Another possible response might be "With what purpose do you inquire?".
And what is a 'female'?
Even limiting ourselves to biological factors, there are at least five possible definitions.
I have a hard time envisioning a helpful "purpose" for which the answer to the question "what is a woman?" includes people with penises.
It's been awhile since I read the Sequences, but my recollection is that Big Yud put a lot of stock in the idea of definitions that "cleave reality at the joints". Like Zack Davis, I think he ought to take his own advice: I'm baffled as to how he (or anyone else for that matter) could think that the definition "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is one that cleaves reality at the joints, as opposed to "a woman is an adult female human".
An entity born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes.
Any purpose that does not involve anyone interacting with said penes.
Sometimes reality has multiple sets of joints, and at which ones we choose to cleave reality can be a function of our goals; e. g. the currently accepted definition of 'fish', excluding whales, cleaves reality at the joints of 'evolutionary relatedness', whereas older definitions which include whales cleave reality at a different set of joints, namely body shape and habitat.
So you would consider someone with XY chromosomes, who, due to some hormonal-response factor, developed ovaries instead of testicles, to be female?
Well, that's just sort of stupid, isn't it? Male people have an insurmountable advantage in strength and speed over female people, and this advantage doesn't disappear even if the male people in question have "medically transitioned". Ergo, any definition of "woman" which includes people with penises will make it impossible for female people to have a fair shot at winning sporting competitions. This is true even though none of the people involved will ever interact with any of the penes involved at any point.
I know they're the same word, but the concept of "sex" has meaning and predictive power beyond the narrow domain of "sexual intercourse" and "sexual gratification".
True. And I think the goals of the trans activist movement are incoherent, quixotic and disturbing. You'll note that, unlike the various definitions for "woman" proposed by trans activists, both the current definition and the older definition of "fish" were coherent, self-consistent and non-circular. I have a hard time believing that any circular definition can possibly cleave reality at any of its claimed joints.
Does such a person exist in reality, or is this a hypothetical?
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AFAICT no one's lost their job, been hounded out of their hobby, lost an election, rewrote decades of a social movement, etc over this one.
Give it time.
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The correct analogy would be if people were stumped about the "what is a sandwich" question. Once you have a definition for a category, you can have a debate about whether a specific instance belongs to one category or another. If it the category really is fuzzy, you'll have actual arguments for why that is, and why a specific instance falls somewhere in the middle, making it difficult to classify.
We've head these sorts of conversations countless times: what is a race, or a species? Does an animal belong to one or the other? What is a planet? Is Pluto one?
What you don't normally get is the Blue Screen of Death when you ask someone to define their terms.
I'm yet to hear a good argument for doing so.
Because you aren't setting off Admiral Ackbar with a 'Gotcha!' question. (Is it possible that we were a little too hard on Sarah Palin?)
Because the particular sequence A Human's Guide to Words covers the precise meta-level issue at hand, that there is no True Definition of 'sandwich/planet/woman' floating in the aetherial realm.
You have to speak a little more clearly. Is the question itself supposed to be a trap? How? The only way I see it as one is that any answer exposes some contradiction in the ideology, at which point you're admitting the person setting the trap is correct.
The trap is that they are hoping to get a soundbite that looks bad when taken out of context, which they can run endlessly in attack ads.
Every single question asked by a political opponent has this goal, and yet only this question produces a segfault crash. Also, the opponents are getting a lot of play out of the refusal to answer as well, so it's not a it's not even working to avoid the issue. And also, if this was the case, there should be someone, somewhere who came up with a good answer, and I haven't seen one yet, even in contexts where soundbites aren't a threat (like, say, this forum).
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They've discovered it loses votes so they're keeping it under their hat until they're back in power, at which point trans-everything is back on the agenda.
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I don't know. APnews has a main story that studiously uses she and her. That strikes me as still zealous on the issue given it's a mass shooter.
Lukewarm support for trans rights looks like "studiously use preferred pronouns but avoid materially contentious questions like kids, prisons, sports and bathrooms", not like "use preferred pronouns for nice people but not for murderers". I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.
I don't know how much a random redditor counts, but I have literally seen a conversation where the person "misgenders" a trans criminal, someone tries to lecture him, and he straight up says (paraphrased), "I use preferred pronouns because I am asked to, but criminals are not owed politeness." Which does square with the argument frequently made (if not necessarily believed) that pronouns are like titles and using them is "just being polite."
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What's weird about that? I'm skeptical of the science behind Trans, but if it convinced me my view would be Trans-Med: there are people with a disorder called "gender dysphoria" and going along with their preferences alleviates their suffering a bit. As long as someone is a functional member of society and in good standing, I can go along with that. It's not that they're allowed to change their pronouns, it's that they're being indulged, the same way I'd indulge an autistic weirdo like Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds. Why should I indulge a murderer, though?
You needn't; but the non-murderous trans people you're interested in being nice to understandably perceive misgendering any trans person as an insult to them as a group. Similarly, you may not care about a black murderer's feelings, but you shouldn't call him the N-word in a newspaper article, because it would be hurtful to your non-murderous black readers.
This assumes the Queer Theory worldview to be axiomatically correct, where it's not a disorder, but a valid identity that each individual can put on and off at will, and a refusal to acknowledge could be construed as an attack on the validity of the entire identity.
I reject that view. Like I said, the view I would be endorsing is trans-medicalism. Asking that I pretend a man is a woman is already a tall order, but like I said, if that makes their life somehow more bearable, it's something I can indulge, if the person is otherwise reasonable.
Asking that I pretend that all men, that declare themselves to be women, are women, no matter how they conduct themselves, is deranged behavior, and a request they have no right to make.
"Nigger" is an unambiguous insult. It's seen this way by people who hear it and are insulted by it, as well as by people who say it. Even when black people use it affectionately between themselves, the core meaning is still an insult, they are just adding sarcasm on top of it, to invert the meaning into something positive.
"Man" is a neutral factual term. It's not being used to insult trans people when relating a story about a trans murderer. It's being used the exact same way it would be, if the murderer was a non-trans male.
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It was a thing around one of the earlier trans violence incidents but I don't recall which one specifically. I'm thinking particularly of Blocked and Reported, with Jesse Singal sticking to the "studiously use preferred pronouns" line (of course) and Katie being much lazier (of course) and/or pushing back a bit, that it ultimately is a respect thing and you don't need to respect murderers.
It's not like there's not similar examples, other populations where slurs are 'allowed' or you won't be expect to respect an identity due to other factors. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find people that would use preferred pronouns for murderers but not for nice conservatives.
A presidential candidate tried to change people's race based on their lack of support for himself. Hypocrisy exists and people are weird, news at 11.
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I don't really do it based on morality, but I've generally been a lot more hesitant to swap pronouns (among the legitimate three; I utterly refuse to use singular-they or neopronouns) if someone's obviously acting erratic and crazy (given the likelihood that said person is not, in fact, stably trans).
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While not an intellectually consistent approach, many people are not intellectually consistent. The worldview that 'we should be nice to trans people, but changing your sex isn't really real, so we should humour it for the goodies but not the baddies' doesn't seem terribly uncommon among moderate progressives.
Indeed, the core argument of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ is that using preferred pronouns is something you should to do to "make a little effort to be nice to people," in the same way that you might tell a little white lie to spare your friend's feelings (or, in the example that Scott uses, humor someone who jokingly declares himself Emperor of the United States).
A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.
This is fair, but I don't think that Scott, if asked, would in fact defend ignoring a murderer's pronouns in the press on that basis. Not sure if he'd phrase his objection in terms of "misgendering anybody is hurtful to the sensibilities of the innocent trans people in your readership, so you should she-her the murderer to be nice to them", or in terms of "misgendering people is a mild but indecorous insult, and it's undignified for journalists to hurl indecorous insults at murderers; you shouldn't harp on about a dead murderer's biological sex any more than you should harp on about a dead murderer having had a small penis or an ugly wart, even if the claims are factually true", or something else I can't model.
I do suspect Scott himself leans quite a bit further to the left on this issue (after all, he's managed to survive living in the San Francisco Bay Area), but the post does a good job describing the "bailey" version of the position that's more palatable to moderates.
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Especially not when they're already dead, along with most of their immediate family who might care about such things.
(Incidentally, this xkcd comic is very relevant to your username.)
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I can imagine a kind of internal logic that overlaps heavily with "men bad, women good" ideas. Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.
As an intuition pump, would people be more likely to "misgender" a MtF or a FtM mass shooter?
That's conceivable, but I'd hardly describe someone who believed that as non-zealous in their gender activism, they'd just be a very idiosyncratic zealot.
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"Choosing to do something heinous" and "changing their identity and pronouns at will" tend to go hand in hand, so this isn't acceptable to TRAs. Their entire thing is that the community has no right to tell you who you are, no matter what.
Older Boomer women currently wish this was the case so they could go on blaming men [and guns] for mass murder. Having a pet of theirs rack up the highest kill count to date west of the Canadian Shield is incongruous with the "gendercide" narrative.
I think the pronouns will stick in this case; the demand for violence from straightwhitemen might exceed supply, but the reaction to that is an increase in the demand for violence perpetrated by non-straightwhitemen (because the demand for violence comes from the highly passive-aggressive "see, we were right about them, now it's time to make them pay" that characterizes most Western nations, in particular English-settled ones).
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There are definitely a lot of people who use the preferred pronouns of trans people they like and not mass murderers, it's just not a position with intellectual support on either side of the aisle.
People who pass well and are integrated into my community I use chosen pronouns. Bad actors I will truegender all day. The vast majority of unaffiliated trans people I just avoid using any pronouns in front of, and call them their real gender in private.
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The medical scandal part of it is yet to play out fully. Like I mentioned in another post, the first detransitioner just won a lawsuit, the FTC is going after WPATH, AAP, and the Endocrine Society. In the UK, they commissioned a massive clinical trial of puberty blockers to get around a ban that was imposed in the wake of the Cass Review. If it goes well for them, we might end up with some sort of "alright, let's call it a draw" resolution, if not it might be the nail in the coffin.
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