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One of the things I've noticed about the media is how they define the narrative by promoting the things that people should be talking about, rather than simply dismiss and ignore. Case in point:
AP News: "New law puts Kansas at vanguard of denying trans identities on drivers licenses, birth certificates"
Note that it's about how trans people must use the correct gender marking (i.e. gender assigned at birth), rather than their own preferred gender, on their drivers' licenses.
I notice that I'm confused as to what "transgender rights" are, and what rights specifically transgender people are demanding that Americans don't already have. Trans people have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for instance. However, the demand that other people refer to you with a specific designation is not really a natural right, and in fact, suppressing or compelling the speech of others is a violation of other people's rights to free speech.
The question of if gender can "change" is purely philosophical and not something that can be settled by research. I can't begin to imagine how research could settle it, unless the research in question is from a hyper-advanced sci-fi future where reversible body modification is possible with no ill side effects.
Is the contradiction here that they can't be protecting women if they don't use favorable labels? If we accept that premise (which I don't), then surely calling women "menstruators" is also not protecting them, but that terminology has been advanced in the name of being inoffensive to trans-identifying males.
I love the multiple layers of lies that get packed into this one sentence. It's like a masterclass in lying while saying something that is technically true.
First, attributing it to unspecified "transgender people" in general. So you can't blame the journalist for printing this statement if it's blatantly false, he is just the messenger.
Second, attributing any supposed harassment from others to carrying ID that "misgenders" them, rather than other factors. They're painting this world where a trans woman (man who says he is a woman) is just like a woman in every other respect of the word, except that he just happens to have "M" on his license, and that causes him to be unduly questioned. In reality, a trans-identifying male can be spotted from a mile away, and if he was ever asked about it (which IME most people are too polite to even do), it was because he was clocked as a man and it's obvious to everyone that he's a man.
Finally, the assertion that they face violence. (To be clear, I mean violence as in physical violence, something that can at the very least be legally categorized as assault. I don't believe that mere speech is violence.) I am going to assert that there are vanishingly few cases where a trans person has faced violence simply on the basis of being trans and nothing else. Out of all the cases I've seen, they faced violence for other reasons, such as being the aggressor or for being involved in sex work.
I'm not saying it's impossible or hasn't happened, but I just haven't seen a case yet that could support the assertion that there are people who want trans people dead or genocided. There are no roaming death squads of extremists hunting down trans people. Being a trans person is quite a safe demographic in America. By and large, most people just don't care about trans people, but they are interested in making sure that trans people don't inflict negative externalities on society.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, we have the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Why the quotes around biological reproductive system? Are biological reproductive systems not a well-defined, scientifically-grounded concept?
My bigger point is just asking why anyone should even care in the first place, including trans people themselves. If I was trans, I would shrug and just accept the "M" designation on my license. To the extent that I would have a problem with the current state of affairs, I would find that the entire licensing regime that the government imposes on the people -- forcing them to register and pay fees in order to drive and participate in society -- is the actual problem here, not merely an unpreferred gender marker. But my stance is that it's not worth it to fight the licensing regime and it's better to comply. Hence, too, I wouldn't care about having the "M" on my license. It seems rather silly to me to question and reject one social construct (gender) while being completely subservient to another (driver's licenses).
And my biggest point is that this shouldn't even be worthy of discussion. If you're going to accept that the government has the right to force you to get licensed, who cares what kind of silly labels they give you? But a mainstream news article publishing this as a headline implies that it's a newsworthy item, a topic of controversy, something that people should care about even though it's really not going to have an impact on anyone's life.
So forcing the German Jews to adopt the name Israel or Sara on legal documents was not a violation of their rights? If some racist jerk wants to call everyone he considers Black 'Nigger $lastname' instead of 'Mr. $lastname', or if a state mandates this, that is all just fine?
You can not compel people to really treat you as your identified gender any more than you can compel them to treat you as one of the cool kids. If a bearded person in a dress complains that none of the guys at the bars are buying them drinks, that is not really actionable.
I think there is no reason to even track the gender or sex on driving licences or in DMV databases. Outside Kansas, people are generally not driving with their dicks.
I think the US is generally rather accommodating with name changes. If you do not like the name your parents gave you, you can change it. The government is generally not going to say 'you were assigned Kevin at birth, you will never be a Benjamin'. But here the government of Kansas is saying 'all of you who have changed their name to Benjamin, all your identity documents are invalid effective immediately. Get new documents which say Kevin.'
This is basically 'your passports are invalid until you get the J stamp', the state unreasonably punishing an outgroup for partisan reasons.
Making driving a car an inalienable right would have large negative externalities. Of course, the libertarian approach would be that what qualifications you need is between you and your liability insurer.
By contrast, for all the moral panic about trans people from the Republicans, the state not caring about your gender identity matching your sex assigned at birth will not have such negative externalities. Nobody is forcing anyone to suck trans cocks. As a straight guy, I can spend weeks without thinking about the existence of dickgirls at all, something which MAGA seems completely unable to achieve.
I am also doubtful that for all the CW-ness of transness, it will be a vote winner for either side. Most people are not trans, nor do they frequently suffer from their tinder dates having unexpected genitals or losing to bearded people in athletic competitions. When the SJ left campaigned on trans, they mostly lost badly, but not because Americans hated trans people, but because they were apathetic -- "here I am stuck trying to make ends meet, and you want me to care about the plight of some sexual deviant". I have high hopes that the reaction in 2026 will be similar: "grocery prices are through the roof, and the MAGA elites want to tell me that forcing some Kansas trannies to get new driving licences is a win for the little man somehow".
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Kiiiind of begging the question here....
Only in the sense that would define most victims of anti-Black violence in the Jim Crow era as not 'simply on the basis of being Black and nothing else'. The modal case of anti-Black violence in that time and place was something along the lines of 'white person Big Mad because black person insufficiently obsequious', or 'black person expects to be paid previously-agreed-upon wages rather than whatever pittance white employer feels like after-the-fact'. These aren't technically, in the narrowest sense, a Black person facing violence simply on the basis of being Black and nothing else; however, they were precipitated by a Black person 'thinking he's as good as a white man', something he has every moral right to be able to do without risk to life or limb, and thus, practically, they round off to that description.
Anti-trans violence follows a similar pattern: some victims are targeted on the basis of 'being trans while thinking of oneself as an equally valid human being rather than a horrifying, disgusting freak'; some are targeted on the basis of 'not performing one's assigned gender to the satisfaction of the Community'.
Speech isn't violence per se, but some speech can carry the implication of impending violence, or can serve the function of coördinating violence; the targets of said speech can't always tell the difference.
No, their first preference would be terrifying them into living by the standards of their assigned gender (which are younger than the New York Times crossword puzzle) no matter how miserable it makes them.
No, just individual bad apples and a barrelful of bystanders who would never personally do anything so vulgar as beat up a todger-bearer-at-birth for being insufficiently masculine, but who don't see it as being as bad as a 'normal' person suffering the same fate. (With their definition of 'normal' being less 'people on the bus' and more 'people at the church sponsored ice cream social'.)
...and just happen to have much stricter standards for 'externalities inflicted by trans people or other non-conformers' than they have for 'people they consider Normal'.
...whom they were interested in making sure didn't inflict negative externalities on society. That did not justify his being killed, because there are worse things than someone causing negative externalities and getting away with it. We expect the people-of-hair-colour, if the only alternative is the murder of people for their political opinions, to absorb the externalities caused by conservative pundits; the same applies to church-ladies being expected, if the only alternative is a combination of State repression and vigilantism making people terrified to put a single toe outside the closet, to absorb the externalities caused by non-heteronormative identities and/or lifestyles.
I'm guessing it was a direct quote from the statute in question.
What if you were trans in the other direction, identifying as male, but assigned female at birth?
The difference is that there is, at least theoretically, a legitimate government purpose in issuing and requiring driver's licences; I benefit from bad drivers not being allowed to operate multi-ton machinery on the same roads I use, whereas I do not benefit from requiring said licences to list what kind of gametes the operator of said machinery produces (very few motor vehicles are operated using the gonads), or for that matter, anything other than the licence-holder's name, date of birth, and photograph.
I will concede that there is an argument to be had as to whether the licencing regime accomplishes this purpose, especially in Miami, where per Dave Barry, "everyone follows the traffic laws of his or her own country or planet of origin".
If this justifies the "trans genocide" rhetoric, then similar rhetoric about transgenders (that is: they're the genocidal ones) is even more justified.
Also my understanding of most Trans violence statistics is that they tend to be more illustrative that being a sex worker is very very dangerous than anything.
Article on the latest trans murder statistics, you will all be surprised to learn that making yourself a big, visible target and/or being poor or living in Third World countries, engaging in criminal activity and sex work is the most dangerous way to be:
Disentangling "murdered solely and simply for being trans" from "murdered because women get murdered more than men by intimate partners/prostitution has always been risky" is tough. Also some of the data gathering is skimpy, to say the least; take this example of 2008 murder in Winnipeg, which is happily included in the "there have been 19 cases of trans people murdered in Canada over the years" statistics, even though it's purely notional:
https://transmurdermonitoring.tgeu.org/en/entity/8ig65tvrsdl
So somebody was allegedly murdered (though it could have been suicide or they fell down the stairs or something) on that date in that place, and all that is known is that they were transgender. No name, nothing else, just "transgender person murdered for being transgender in Canada, put it on the list".
Yeah, sure. There's a very subtle eliding going on with these cases; from "trans person murdered" to "this is because they were trans". Such as this case, which could be an ordinary street robbery gone wrong (again, data very skimpy). The victim was trans, but that's not the reason for the murder (unless we assume random person on street identified this as a trans woman and decided to do some trans murdering). However, in such lists released to the press and used as publicity, the implication is "all these people were murdered for being trans" not "trans people are murder victims for a lot of the same reasons cis people are murder victims".
That dishonesty is what dries up any sympathy I have for the activists and their causes and calls for "we just want to be treated with politeness".
Okay being a sex worker and/or a major political agitator as a black/brown person in a third world country is dangerous. Yet the average rhetoric implies that the average university-educated white/asian trans person has a vast threat of targeted violence.
In Australia right now there's a medium news story at the moment focused on hardcore Islamists luring gays on hookup apps to beat and rob them. Yet similar dishonesty is being implied as if random White Australians
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Bad behavior for sure, discrimination maybe, but how is that violence?
I think what the gp meant is - The majority of violence against black men was in the form of - Back man demands money owed, white vader says - I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it further and gives him less. Black man asks again for full sum, white vader roughs him up, police scratch their balls and ignore it.
Meant perhaps but hardly stated.
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I don't particularly object at the macro scale, but I do think KS could have left those driver's licenses valid until they need to be renewed and fix the problem then.
It's maybe a small showing of grace, and maybe undeserved (isn't all grace?) but it strikes me as just fine.
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You need a gens before you can have a genocide.
There is no gens there. Trans genocide is just a hysterical escalation beyond any reason.
Could also be seen as a perfectly cold-blooded and reasonable escalation that aims to leverage existing taboos and cultural touchstones to elevate the favored group. That it has nothing to do with actual ground-level reality is hardly germane to the culture war.
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You also need a -cide, which isn’t in evidence.
People get really uncomfortable really fast when you bring up the stats of the racial/ethnic profile of who's doing the killing of the trans people being genocided. In almost 90% of cases the perp AND the victim were black.
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And these are exactly the rights that the trans lobby is asking from legislatures, community groups, and everywhere else. The invented right to compel speech from others regardless of their interlocutors' right to free speech, and the right to force themselves into women-only spaces (including but not limited to sporting teams, change rooms, lesbian communities) over women's right to freedom of association.
In Australia, the Lesbian Action Group (a gender-critical feminist-separatist organization) is currently in the Federal Court against the Australian Human Rights Commission, appealing the AHRC's decision to deny LAG an exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act that LAG sought, to be able to hold women-only events.
The more this has gone on, the more I think the evidence points toward the activist vanguard of the trans lobby being mostly autogynephilic men for whom the primary source of "euphoria" is an ongoing need for active validation from outside that "yes, you are a real woman". Whether this is from physically intimidating smaller women into silence, getting the state involved (example: Jonathan Yaniv and his "wax my ladyballs" crusade), or participating in (and often dominating) women-only community groups and sports.
Under this lens, the fact that the licence says
Mand notFis a reminder, constantly carried in that person's wallet, that the validation is incomplete. That this is intolerable to that person should be obvious.It seems obvious to me, given how well you picked apart the "masterclass in lying" sentence above it. The author is doing motte-and-bailey with punctuation: it's scare-quoted in the hope that the reader learns to flinch away from it as a fnord, but defensible as a direct quote from the regulation or statute.
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You can go into just about any 4chan thread to convince yourself of the existence of such people. It's just that once you filter out the LARPing, the incompetent, the cowardly and the ones who rationally decide that the legal consequences are not worth it, not a lot remain.
Either way, I don't think there is much productive discussion to be had from reheating this topic in its direct form for the nth time (it at best devolves into questions of whose feelings it is more important to protect, and more often just involves flag-waving and rallying the for/against troops for messages of support or outrage).
Instead, let me ask a different but related question: In many European cultures, it is common practice that people who hold academic degrees (in particular PhDs) can list them with their name everywhere, replacing the appellation (Mr/Mrs/Ms) where available. So your doorbell, passport, ID etc. would say "Dr. Smith". This conveys not only bragging rights and a culturally reinforced feeling of achievement, but also a lot of practical advantages in everyday life: bureaucrats are nicer to you, postal workers are less likely to break your package, neighbours are less likely to call the police if you barbecue on your balcony at 2AM. Usually, who is allowed to put "Dr." is quite stringently regulated, with steep penalties: it is tied to degree program accreditation for native universities, and for foreign ones there is usually an extremely long list of arcane criteria involving research intensity ratings and what-not, which also sometimes requires you to pay money to some local agency to issue a document certifying that your foreign degree conveys the right to be consider a "Dr." nationally for this purpose.
Now suppose you were a resident of a European country, but had studied at a US university. Let's say you are also reasonably invested in US politics. You learn that your country has recently updated its title carrying accreditation rules, so now only PhDs from US universities that have [sufficiently strong, sufficiently subdued] DEI initiatives are accepted. If you do not have your documents updated and promptly remove the "Dr." from your doorbell, you risk steep administrative fines, or worse. How do you feel about this? Do you think it is fair game or are you going to protest?
To begin with, in what ways do you figure this scenario is similar, and in what ways do you think it is essentially different from the gender ID one?
I'm another who's always made the analogy with titles, but hadn't thought about the Euro Dr. thing. Personally I quite like that they do that - as the saying goes "German cars are better because in Germany an engineer is Herr Doktor, and in England he's a bloody mechanic." (Maybe less applicable today, now that German cars aren't so good and English cars ~don't exist). Probably would have completed my PhD for the vanity instead of going into industry at the first opportunity if I was German.
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It's interesting you mention that because we had a minor local kerfuffle here that made the news because someone dared to refer to a local official by his first name rather than Dr. They had to publicly apologize and everything. To me, people who insist on it come off as petty and pretentious. The US is famously egalitarian in generally eschewing the peerage system and delineating class by using titles. It's far more common to use first names even with your medical doctor. To insist otherwise creates a separation, the old idea of "how you treat your betters." So it's very much a class-based issue, so I don't think it's comparable to what trans people are asking.
Otherwise I will just say I've known one trans person in my life. I do believe the issue caused intense distress. I know there's been a trend of people "jumping" on the trans bandwagon and basically adopting it as if it was a sub-identity like goth or whatever. This person wasn't one of those. They were a full adult, very reserved, Christian and generally conservative, and they didn't tend to really reveal anything private about themselves. So it was quite a shock when they came out. They weren't out to score political points or be trendy or live out a fetish or whatever you might be thinking. They just wanted to live authentically, to heal whatever psychic suffering they struggled under. I don't know how much counseling or whatever they underwent. At the end of the day, if you care for someone as a person, you accept what they tell you about themselves. So I am respectful and kind to them and treat them as the gender they're presenting as.
But you'll notice I haven't actually used a gendered pronoun here to talk about them because, yes, it's not something I'm wholly comfortable with. While personally I'm on the side of compassion and acceptance, I understand that has very little to do with what policies are correct. Sex-segregated spaces are a thing for a reason and I think those should be preserved. Same thing with sports. There need to be much stronger guardrails on medical interventions rather than automatic total affirmation, and I'm glad to see signs of changes there. The drivers license thing I could go either way on. If you're arresting someone, you need to know whether to house them with the women or the men. But if you're just looking to identify someone or circulate their description, you need to know what they're presenting as. Having M on a drivers license seems like it hinders identification if they're walking around presenting as female.
Someone like that, yeah, I have sympathy. Maybe even let's permit them to put female on the driver's licence, though that's a big switch. They're not trying to score points, they want to live as normally as they can.
But the problem is that they are lumped in with, and used by, the types like Mr. Restaurant Misgendered who made a career out of looking to be offended in order to create those videos. Mr. Misgendered gets repudiated by the trans activism groups as a narcissistic grifter, then I have no problem with your acquaintance getting help and support because there's genuine need there. But Mr. Misgendered won't be, that's the trouble.
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Wasn't there something about the insistence on referring to Jill Biden as Dr. Biden? With one side claiming it was horrible disrespect to omit her title and the other claiming it was puncturing pretension?
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Is that the case outside Germany and Austria?
I can't recall having ever seen it anywhere else and quite a few people make fun of Germans for that (eg. Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Someone). Sure, in academic and some professional contexts you would say Dr Someone but not in normal life. Unless you were German, of course.
German here. I have a Dr. rer. nat., but don't really identify as it. In the course of earning one, you typically get disabused of any notion that they signify elite human capital. STEM is full of jokes to the tune of 'Oh, you have a PhD? Don't worry, I will speak slowly then.'
When I was perhaps eight and playing some outside, I corrected a kid referring to my father as 'Herr $lastname' to 'Doktor $lastname'. That did earn me quite the talk.
There is a cliche of lower class people calling their physician 'Herr Doktor' or 'Frau Doktor' (which is especially funny given that what you need for a Dr. med. would not even earn you a Bachelor of Science), but the upper middle class prefers more subtle class signifiers.
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I've long made the comparison between "gender" and titles. I think it was one of my early moderator stances on slatestarcodex.
Butchering someone's title intentionally does seem like a mark of disrespect. But insisting someone else use a title is a form of social domination. "President" is a title as well.
Disrespect: Former reality TV star Donald Trump gave the SOTU address.
Neutral: Donald Trump's SOTU address spoke on these topics...
Domination: Any news agency that does not refer to President Trump as President Trump in their articles will not be invited to the white house press corps briefings.
Of course, the Register did a thing where they did not even refer to him by name. e.g. "Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs". Possibly the only way to report on him without making him stronger.
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From the other side, to take your example of "can you call yourself doctor?", the demand to change identity documents to reflect a fake status is as if someone who didn't go to university, didn't have a PhD, and was not otherwise qualified no matter if it's DEI or not, was sticking up "I am Doctor Smith, address me as such" on their doorbell and letters and the rest of it.
Whatever about driving licences, I do think that "I want to change my birth certificate so it says Mom and Dad had a baby girl on 17th September 1978 in Wenatchee Maternity Hospital at 3:45 a.m. and not a baby boy" is not permissible. A birth certificate is either a statement of fact or not. If we're going to make legal documents like marriage and turn it into "whatever you feel makes you happy, be that two guys can get married, six people are too a real marital unit, or boys will be girls and girls will be boys, sure thing and paperwork is just fiction depending on how you feel at any particular moment in time", then what is even the point of having registers?
I think that in the context of Trump's SAVE act, it popped up that people can -- and might have to -- get a birth certificate with their current legal name on it. I also think that some countries use up-to-date birth certificates to track marriage status.
If birth certificates are updated regularly to reflect changes in the life circumstances of a person, rather than being stored on the blockchain shortly after birth, then it makes sense to also update them to reflect cosmetic changes in things like first name or gender identity.
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Can you give an example? The typical chud joke is mocking the high suicide rates of the group, not threatening to kill them. I don't go to 4chan, so I might end up surprised, but I'm pretty skeptical your claim can be substantiated by clicking on a random thread there.
Genocidal intent also has to differ between 'If I had a button that would instantly delete Group A, would I press it' and actual committed violence.
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You can just call yourself doctor, nobody cares. You can't suddenly start practicing medicine or teaching at a university, but nobody will stop you from calling yourself that.
Punishable with up to 1 year of jail e.g. in Germany; and yes, if your Karen neighbour figures out you were not technically allowed to, she will absolutely report you.
Yeah, but over there misgendering is also punishable with rather large fines.
It is? Hot damn. Then it would actually be rather dangerous...if "trans people" actually existed, outside of a few basement dwellers nobody ever sees in daylight.
Yup, €10K, thanks to the recently(ish) passed Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. It already resulted in a peak-Germany situation where a neonazi got jailed for neonazism, had a sudden sentencing-day transition, and started suing people for being referred to as anything other than a stunning and brave woman.
Eh, much like everywhere else, the average transgender case changed from weird middle-aged dude that likes to throw on a dress, to autistic adolescent girl having trouble making sense of her place in the world.
It's common enough that I've actually seen the latter organically (i.e. not because I'm obsessed with the subject)
Reading that article had me grinning from ear to ear at the ridiculous troll situation.
I feel bad for the women that ended up locked up with him, but hopefully he is just a troll, and not an actual psycho.
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I recall that you have some OPSEC in place, so no sweat if you refuse to answer, but where?
Here in the Provinz, there just aren't any. I mean, for sure they are somewhere, we do have the internet after all and social contagions do spread, but it doesn't look like they go outside enough to be encountered in the wild. Or the whole pronouns business is after all not important enough to actually make it public in person.
I think some time ago I PMed you where I was at. It's not exactly rural, but my impression is it's still seen as relatively conservative. I think the girl's father lives in one of the wokest parts of the country though, so that could have contributed to the contagion.
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That is not the point; 4bpp is specifically analogizing the overnight invalidation of documents where you called yourself "Dr." to the overnight invalidation of ID papers which included transgender people's chosen genders instead of their sex. In either case, it seems inordinately disruptive to the lives of the people involved, even if one were in favor of phasing out the practice as far as issuing new documents is concerned.
I think this interpretation stretches credulity enormously. You don’t go out and picket over minor changes in procedure, even if it is annoying; you do so for perceived loss of privilege (the inability to use the Dr. prefix as a signifier).
Every trans person has lost the privilege to drive if their documents are immediately invalidated. Driving without a valid license is a crime in Kansas. Any trans person driving around with their old license would be risking arrest and prosecution until they could secure an updated license.
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I suppose I would feel stung from having invested so much into a title that is now less useful, but it's not as if me removing "Dr." from everywhere means that I no longer have a PhD. I might protest, but only to the extent of making my voice heard. I don't think it would be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and I would probably have bigger things in my life to worry about.
The big difference is that I can't see there being a good reason for the change in PhD accreditation, especially retroactively. Meanwhile, changing back the definition of gender to be the one that billions of people have understood for thousands of generations, and which is rooted in biological reality, makes sense to me.
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I agree, violence for the most part is not actually that common in the US unless you hang out with bad crowds and a few examples otherwise are statistical anomalies.
Ok but how the heck you gonna dismiss violence against trans people as just a few small cases but then cite a single anecdote of violence here? There are not roaming death squads hunting down and killing conservatives either.
A few examples to the contrary does not change the statistical truth that basically any demographic in the US (besides black male really) is a rather safe demographic.
Now this is just blatantly not true, I've seen plenty of passing trans people. It's a toupee fallacy at best and delusional wishful thinking at worst. There's a lot of overlap in male and female appearance, there's even plenty of men (who identify as male) that can make for a convincing female appearance without even having the feminizing effects of hormones, a lot of the "femboys" can do that.
Yeah there's lots of people who don't, but there's plenty who do without any trouble.
How the heck do you know what you do there? If you were trans, how do you know you wouldn't be able understand their problems? Certainly in this hypothetical you would have those same feelings of discomfort about being identified as male.
Because it is, and it's not a genocide? I've mentioned this before, but I've gone through two of the lists from the Trans Day of Remembrance List of Murdered Genocided Trans People, and about three cases were "yep, this person was murdered solely for being trans".
When your supply of Trans Genocide is so skimpy you need to include "fatal hit-and-run traffic accident" as "Deliberately MURDERATED FOR BEING TRANS!", I think we can indeed safely say "violence as trans people is just a few small cases". In fact, the lists should be celebrated as being true achievement of the aims of being accepted as your preferred gender, given how many domestic violence and murders by ex-partners happened, just like cis women! Yay! You are being treated like a Real Woman!
(That last is not meant as anything more than black humour, just to make it clear).
(And I wish I was joking about the transphobic automobiles, but that was a seriously intended explanation for including such cases in the stats: systemic how's your father bingo card phobia and -isms mean that, uh, if a trans person is killed in a car accident then it's equivalent to being deliberately murdered for being trans, society to blame).
I would consider state enforced speech restrictions violence, institutional violence if you will. So the compelled speech pronouns stuff in Canada definitely qualifies. The roving gangs of auto-mods in Reddit while not state sponsored are still violence. If Elon hadn't bought twitter people would still get shadow banned/banned for not toeing the line. The UK is also a tiny step away from extending their anti-anti-imigration in person policing to trans stuff.
Calling it violence when the state does it, fine. You do suffer violence when you don't comply.
But reddit mods? Really?
Hey, if words are violence so is censorship.
Big if.
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This feels like you read half of the sentence and immediately decided to write up several paragraphs without any interest in the rest of the comment. Go back and give it an actual read, I never argued that violence against trans people is a common or major issue.
The thing is, claims about epidemics of anti-trans violence are used to back up "and this latest legislation/storm in a teacup is yet more encouragement to commit trans genocide!" and are unquestioningly repeated by the media.
Such lists, as I have exampled, get issued by the activists and are propaganda. Instead of fact-checking (and I only needed about twenty minutes with Google and the names, I didn't even use AI!) "is this really true?", the media is happy to parrot "56 murders of trans people according to this list from Reputable Organisation" when the truth is "56 unsubstantiated claims according to this propaganda from activists".
One example from a previous list was "Trans man murdered for being trans!" Turns out the person was an environmental activist who was shot inside a tent during a police raid on a camp. You can argue over "was this murder?" but it is undeniably a lie to say it was "trans man murdered for being trans".
So the next time you, or anyone, sees a news report about "X number of trans people murdered due to transphobic hate crimes", you should assume that this is probably a lie, at least about "murdered for being trans due to transphobia as instanced by state of Y legislation about not putting rapists with functioning male genitalia into women's prisons, which is dysphoria-inducing hate legislation against innocent trans people who just want to be treated civilly and which encourages crazed murderers to go out and murder trans people".
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There aren't, but I would imagine that if I was a notable conservative figure, I would be much more worried about a lone assassin tracking me down and hunting me, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death. That seems to be kind of the point of such political violence.
How do you know they were trans if they were passing? I'm not trying to do a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious.
I see this similarly to someone who is carrying a concealed weapon. Isn't the entire point of carrying concealed that you don't know if someone is carrying concealed? If they, for example, tell others that they are carrying concealed, that defeats the utility of concealment. In the same way, a real woman isn't telling everyone that she is a woman, because other people see her and automatically recognize her as one. Ideally, a trans person wouldn't have to tell others their preferred gender, it would just be obvious to everyone. They wouldn't even have to say "my pronouns are she/her".
I still feel like most trans people don't pass because I've never thought of someone as non-trans only to find out that they were trans later.
Is discomfort about being identified as male a prerequisite for being trans? If I'm a trans person but I have no such discomfort, am I not a real trans person? These are questions even trans activists have disagreements on.
Either way, I don't think that it's sustainable to make all efforts to remove any way I could possibly be identified or categorized as male, so I think it would be reasonable to draw the line somewhere.
Well
Sometimes people just list it on an online bio or something, you can find plenty of folk who clearly look quite feminine. Sure pictures and videos are different than IRL, but it's not "obvious" there still. Someone like NikkieTutorials was a famous content creator on YouTube and they're only known to be trans because someone in their life who was told it threatened to out them. "Outing" wouldn't even be a thing anyway if it wasn't the case that some people do pass.
Plenty of trans people tell stories of doctors asking them about pregnancy risks or whatever else sort of story that only works if passing really does happen and them having to explain that they're trans. Maybe they're all lying, but that is some evidence.
Just go to like an anime convention or something else where people dress up. There's a lot of men who can make for very convincing women.
The reverse, "transvestigations" claiming people like Macron's wife or Erika Kirk or other famous women as being potentially trans show that many of the "signs" are clearly something that occur in ordinary women too. Sometimes it goes into ridiculous territory even like this lady has a picture of her after a C-section with her newborn and husband and she still gets constantly harassed with people trying to claim she is trans because of how she looks, even trying to say that she must have had a uterus transplant (which if a trans woman had a successful transplant, got pregnant and gave birth would be a huge story). A lot of people who can "always tell" refuse to admit otherwise. Even offline here's a teen who got harassed and told to leave the women's restroom, despite her not being trans.
Statistically speaking you probably don't even know a trans person passing or not who is meaningfully trans in the sense of changing their name/hormones/identification/etc to begin with! It's something like .5% of the population for it, that's relatively rare. 1/200 is pretty uncommon, dunbar's number is around 150, and that's things like associates not close friends who would tell you something like that. If you have something like five really close friends, four family members and three partners throughout life the chance of any of them being meaningfully trans is really low to begin with. However it is possible that someone in the nameless crowds at the grocery store or movie theater or sports stadiums might be and you don't even notice and count them because they're a stranger.
Yes that's the toupee fallacy. The argument that all toupees look bad and you can always tell falls apart when you consider that good looking realistic toupees aren't noticed.
Well discomfort for birth sex but I think generally so. At the very least it's pretty common among people who meaningfully transition with and not like a stupid 16 year old who just puts neopronouns in their bio and calls themselves trans.
I'm pretty sure the average Mottizen by virtue of educational status and exposure to mild autistic hobbies like Themotte.org is massively more likely than the true average of having run into trans people.
Also 'yaddayadda influencer passes' is generally in the context of an aggressively curated media suite of videos and photos from particular angles.
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You can not hide an adams apple, height, shoulder configuration, and most of the "passing" trans individuals are either children, extremely low T males or various Asian descent inherently neotenous with help from make up. I am frankly tired of the "there are invisible trans all over the place, you just don't know about them" song and dance.
A handful of genetic abnormalities(XXY, XYY) like that woman that looks like a dude shouldn't be used to excuse 99% of cases. The Hermeneutics of
GayTrans Suspicion surely suck for the wrongly accused, but w/e.I do kinda feel for mannish and/or tall women on dating apps these days. I remember when I was on the apps a few years ago I'd always have a vague twinge of concern when those profiles popped up.
Also the amount of clearly trans profiles that were doing their best to hide that fact felt like potentially cruising for a bruising from somebody desperate who didn't know how to read the cultural norms.
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#1: Pictures and videos can easily be manipulated to make trans people look passing. I'm not talking about AI or anything like that, just techniques (that ironically enough, real women use too) like filters to hide blemishes/shadows and using angles that are most appealing. I'm talking about most appearances of trans people in my daily life. They do stick out like a sore thumb. The trans-identifying females less so, but I can tell the difference.
"Outing" is unrelated to transgenderism. You can threaten to "out" someone's anonymous identity, for example StoneToss being outed as Hans Christian Graeber. When trans people are "outed", it's usually the reveal of their birth name, or even just making it common knowledge that they are trans and it's acceptable to speak of them as such. The central example that comes to my mind is a trans-identifying man being unwillingly outed to his parents, perhaps because they don't approve of his identity. Were he not outed, he would just be their son to them, meaning he doesn't pass. I'm not sure how passing is relevant here.
#2: Even if I believe this, I think it's negligible evidence and there are other explanations that are more probable. Many forms have standard questions about pregnancy risks even for guys. And doctors may have just adopted a universal set of questions regardless of gender identity because it reduces the risk of a malpractice lawsuit for failing to ask a critical question, but no one's gonna sue them if they ask a man if he's pregnant.
#3: Even if this is true and they pass there, it does not follow that a man on the street in everyday life could pass. People do not usually cosplay as anime girls in real life.
#4: "Transvestigators" are conspiracy theorists by another name and I don't use or endorse any of their methodology. There are obviously many similarities between male and female bodies, but that doesn't mean it's likely that a man can pass as a woman. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Your position on noticing non-passing trans people seems unfalsifiable. If I don't notice a person is trans, that's them successfully passing. If I do notice them being trans and they are poorly passing, then I'm just cherry-picking because I'm not counting all the successful people. Then is there even a set of observations that could refute the assertion that trans people typically pass, if all can be explained the same way? What if we agree to compare the rates of non-passing trans people with the percentage of the population that trans people are? I notice that in my daily life, the number of obviously trans people I can count divided by the number of people I notice or interact with, is roughly proportional to the percentage of trans people that make up the population. It's entirely possible that I missed one or two trans people who pass extremely well, but I'm fine concluding from my observations that most trans people don't pass.
I will have to admit that I don't know what exactly I would do if I had discomfort for my birth sex, but I would probably seek treatment and not transition due to the surgeries basically being medieval torture. I would continue to weigh the costs and benefits of each option and see if they are worth it, as I have done here.
Does this not literally admit that it's not always obvious to people? If you were correct about them never passing, there would be no need to "make it common knowledge that they are trans" in the same way there's no reason to make it common knowledge that someone is black. Everyone would already know.
Also on that same vein, here's another piece evidence that passing trans people do exist.
The argument about if a person should disclose if they're trans. Completely unnecessary if we assume that they never pass and everyone is aware. You could never possibly have sex with a trans woman without giving explicit consent towards that under your theory.
It's also not possible to just chuck that up to lying trans people and allies either given that the "I want them to disclose" side is going to be primarily people who don't want to be with a trans woman.
Ok explain this one then. I'm in a star trek related discord server and one of the users is an out on discord trans woman who I remember had once offhandedly mentioned they got asked for a tampon by a stranger that day and had to say sorry they were out. It was just an offhanded remark (many of us often talk about random things/post pics/etc, we got a kinda friend group going on). I do not believe it to be a lie, I've seen pictures and videos of them too and they look quite feminine.
Why would that have happened unless they looked convincingly female and the stranger in need did not view her as an ordinary woman? If your theory was true, the stranger should have not behaved in such a way and needed such a deflection.
It does mean that it must be way harder to tell than you might think. False positives are an error too.
This isn't "my position", it's a known logical fallacy. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
It doesn't work to say "ah but disproving this fallacy could be happening is too difficult for me so I wish to ignore it". I've provided multiple affirmative arguments for trans people being able to pass, and your one continued argument is challenged significantly by a known selection bias flaw.
I've met MTF trans that are able to pass, generally those fortunate enough to have an already feminine, petite and neotenous racial background. Admittedly that may be my ignorance, as for instance I can probably recognize say 50% of Thai ladyboys on sight and my friend's Thai girlfriend can bat at 99%.
I've also met FTMs who pass, but generally it's more through the 'nobody really cares about this short round dude beyond the first glance' way than in the 'attempting to perform peak feminity way' that MTF aspire to.
Nonetheless the majority are easy to clock, especially outside of Asia.
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