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New Aella survey post on child sexual assault just dropped: https://aella.substack.com/p/a-whole-lot-of-csa-data
I think her analysis is generally unobjectionable, but do find it notable that she buries the lead on the "non-cis" sexual assault findings. I didn't dig into the crosstabs, but non-cis people are plausibly getting sexually assaulted even before they become openly non-cis. And while there's plausibly causation in the direction of abnormal pre-egg-breaking/transition behavior being more likely to attract sexually assault, the data re: non-cis people reporting more CSA still very much supports the hypothesis that either:
It might be that these hypothesis are both correct, but for different population subsets. For example, nonbinary people might be disproportionately motivated by a desire to escape a concept they associate with their assault, while transgender people are the ones afflicted by a root factor. (Or vica-versa, either explanation would be possible.)
I would personally bet on the second hypothesis predominating, though. And in particular, the associations re: social class/parental age/trauma are suggestive of some specifically anxiety-related problem. Working hypothesis: If you grow up poor or insecure or to young parents or female you become anxious and depressed, which leads you to be more likely to suffer sexual assault, more likely to interpret past events as sexual assault, more likely to start identifying yourself as non-cis (because of body image issues? Data is obviously underspecified and outside the scope of aella's post), and more likely to be negatively affected long-term by sexual assault when it does happen.
...So if you have kids, and want to maximize their chances of identifying as cisgender into adulthood, your top priority should be reducing their opportunities for anxiety. Openly worrying about drag queen story hour and queer books would be ironically counterproductive.
Ideological disclaimer: as a catholic I believe there are only two genders, fixed at birth, but as a transhumanist also I'm in favor of letting anyone, including children, do whatever they want to their own bodies. (I accept some nuance re: having to get psychologists/a judge to sign off that someone is truly acting in their own uncoerced self-interest, with increasing scrutiny in proportion to the danger posed by the modification and the mental irresponsibility of the requestor.)
Am I really the only one who sees an obvious link?
It's autism. Being on the autism spectrum is massively more common among people who are trans (particularly MTF in modern world). Likewise not understanding social cues and being generally weird exposes one to all sorts of issues (and then there's the combination of autism spectrum running in families and how that may affect the previous generation or two's behavior towards future victims...).
Also this being Aella's survey, it almost certainly has a massive self selection bias for people on the spectrum so that's a huge confounding factor.
I'm quite convinced that a lot (discalaimer: not all) of those spectrum-y people, especially the FtMs, female asexuals, and non-attention-whore they/thems, are just kinda trusting and gullible and were groomed into the identity by the LGBTQXY recruitment drive, independent of any molestation.
Even the from-an-early age trans stuff makes me slightly doubtful, just because I once knew someone dumb who thought her 18-month-old might be trans because he didn't like wearing pants.
The problem is the way any expression of gender non-conformity gets lovebombed, when it should be neither encouraged nor discouraged.
I honestly think there should be some kind of differentiation between trans people and autistic trans people.
Very much so, as I just wrote in another comment.
A cishet couple I know have a fancy multimonitor remote work setup and a large My Little Pony collection in their respective studies which I find funny for fitting stereotypes about men vs women so well. No points for guessing which room is closer to every MtF person I've ever known IRL or online (hint: it's not the one with the MLP collection).
Having been a teenager during the bronie era, I thought you were trying to say that the man had both a multi-monitor setup and a my little pony collection. Also, IMO, multi monitor setups are highly popular in the workplace among both men and women, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me for a woman who works a computer-based job at home to have a multi-monitor setup for productivity.
That said, on the trans question, I’ve met trans women who struck me as masculine in their hobbies, some who struck me as more autistic than anything else, and some who struck me very feminine in a stereotypical sense, like being a reader of romance novels or having strong opinions about makeup in the way only women and guys like James Charles do. If some fraction of gay men are feminine, like gay hairdressers, it doesn’t beggar belief that some trans women would be, too.
Having grown up in a very red part of the US, I’d say that trans women from rural or conservative environments often seem much more invested in femininity than trans women from the coasts, which may speak to the level of dysphoria or femininity a person needs to reach in that kind of environment before taking the social risk of transitioning.
As magicalkittycat says, this type of person is rare, very rare, and my very loose outsider’s impression is that they’re happy to ally with the more flamboyant elements of the trans coalition or the broader the LGBT coalition because of strength in numbers, while privately being more reserved and actually rather conventional, if you get to know them.
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Do you have an elevator pitch for Catholic transhumanism? I thought that they were diametrically opposed.
Best I can do is this.
As a Catholic myself, I don’t see any explicit contradiction between the two, just things that would strike someone as ‘extremely’ odd and strange. Justin Martyr was the first real post-New Testament theologian who tried being both a Christian and a Platonist because he saw such a natural harmony between the two. Being a Catholic and Transhumanist is definitely unorthodox for sure, but maybe that’ll change in the future. I don’t think if we ever get to the point of instantiating consciousness in computers it’ll provide neo-Aristotelian’s evidence that’ll resurrect hylomorphism and prove computers have souls, in the same way that when computers malfunction we don’t accuse them of being possessed by demons. Even though I believe in the reality of demons, I ‘don’t’ believe that’s how that works.
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I would imagine that there is a correlation with r=1 between the two. SCNR.
I know you meant "victim of CSA and non-cis", which would be weird. But then again, quite a few things could are both weird and true. Generally, everything is correlated with everything else, mostly through boring confounders (perhaps the size of the town one grew up, or absent parents could be a risk factor for either).
I mean, it is also possible that child abusers in aggregate have some preference for victims which are less gendered than their peers, and that being less gendered as a kid also makes one less likely to be cis. But I don't think that is a big effect either.
But of all the medical conditions a kid could have (and which might be avoided through embryo selection to some degree), being trans does not feel like a very big deal. (Of course, I say that as one who is happily cis-by-default. OTOH, I have been on antidepressants for more than a decade and would probably trade them for hormones if some fairy offered me the deal.)
Yes, but it is also not meant to be productive, it is performative, signaling. You might as well try to raise non-alcoholic kids by pretending that booze does not exist. Or try to raise abstinent kids by not teaching them about sex, which commonly results in teen pregnancies.
Unless you ban kids who are openly non-cis from schools (which would be problematic), kids are going to get exposed to other kids who decide that they are trans. Of course, talking about how brave they are will lead to more kids deciding that they are trans. A better approach might be to offer them your condolences for them not having the chromosome set they would like to have, use their preferred name and continue with the lesson plan.
Not to derail things. But how true is this? I know people say that. But i find it hard to believe someone would commission, publish and report on a study that says Catholic abstinance sexed in fact reduces pregnant, harm, whatever.
I know you said “not teaching about sex” which is a straw man version of the argument.
I have no idea. But I could easily imagine how a religious abstinence approach is superior to the modern public school insanity that is sex and gender.
Wildly not true. If you'd like to know more, you can consult the considerable literature on the subject:
Underhill, Operario, Montgomery Cochrane systematic review (2007). This is one of the strongest reviews: 13 randomized or quasi-randomized trials, 15,940 U.S. youth. It found no consistent effect of abstinence-only programs on unprotected vaginal sex, frequency of sex, number of partners, sexual initiation, or condom use, and concluded the trials suggested these programs were ineffective in high-income settings.
Denford et al. review of systematic reviews (2017). This “review of reviews” covered 37 systematic reviews summarizing 224 randomized controlled trials. Its conclusion was explicit: abstinence-only interventions were ineffective at producing positive changes in sexual behavior, while comprehensive interventions were effective.
Chin et al. / Community Preventive Services Task Force (2012). Their systematic review/meta-analytic work found insufficient/inconsistent evidence to conclude that group-based abstinence education works, whereas comprehensive risk-reduction interventions were found effective.
Trenholm et al. / Mathematica federal evaluation (2007). This congressionally mandated evaluation of four Title V abstinence programs found the programs had no effect on youths’ sexual abstinence and that participants were no more likely to have unprotected sex.
Kirby, review of 56 studies (2008). Kirby found that most abstinence programs did not delay initiation of sex and only 3 of 9 abstinence programs showed any significant positive effect on any sexual behavior. By contrast, about two thirds of comprehensive programs showed strong evidence of benefit.
Kohler, Manhart, Lafferty (2008). In a population-level analysis, abstinence-only education showed no significant effect on teen pregnancy or vaginal intercourse, while comprehensive sex education was associated with lower teen pregnancy risk. It also found that teaching contraception was not associated with more adolescent sexual activity or STDs
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Actually I’ve heard the relevant group to study on this is the Mormons and statistics on citizens in Utah. They also have one of the highest adoption rates in the country. It’s less about preventing it from happening and controlling for the context in how it happens such that it’s intentional.
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Wow, those graphs are physically difficult to parse- in fact I'd actually say they're actively harmful to a proper understanding of the data. A "plain reading" (at least to me) of that data suggests 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 12 boys have been sexually penetrated in an unwanted manner before the age of 12, which isn't passing the sniff test given, if I remember correctly, prevalence of sexual contact by 12 is about 5%, or 1 in 20. So I doubt I'm reading the graph correctly, but there's no way to derive the total context or get a scale of the proportions involved relative to all respondents.
I think this is ignoring the obvious-to-me confounder that becoming non-cis can cause them to become a victim of sexual assault [or reinterpret themselves as such] where they hadn't necessarily considered themselves as such before. This can also happen to cisgendered people, and women more than men for reasons that have to do with an asymmetric biological incentive to claim abuse for social or financial stability or gain (it's very popular to do this and makes headlines when it happens re: #MeToo, also, internal narratives matter to people re: 2rafa's comment below).
Well, no, if you grew up poor, 2 things are likely true for kid-you:
Which means you're more likely to be "propositioned", and less likely to feel you have the power to pull back before it happens, and apparently this decreases monotonically by wealth level (outside of the 'elite' answers, whose error bars are very large- though I can believe this becomes truer for elite children simply because the chance for catastrophe in that scenario becomes large/taking 'no' for an answer and being driven enough to take risk kind of selects you out of the 'elite' group, obviously).
Also, and perhaps most importantly, we don't actually hear the first question: what's abuse? The analysis buries "indicates that they might be the most enthusiastic participants" in there, which suggests the question of "abuse" wasn't worded properly (i.e. in the legal sense, not the objective 'it was unwanted' sense- and I'd expect a survey designer who claims to value childhood autonomy to know better), which is a massive deal, especially when it comes to drawing conclusions on the last question.
Perhaps the second set of data will be more illuminating, though I'm not holding my breath on this one. If the base question/premise is bad, the analysis won't get better.
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One big issue is the difference between the, for lack of better labels, the meaningfully transsexual transgender person, and the the "trender" transgender person.
The meaningfully transexual trans person, who has typically had their feelings since they were young despite lack of input, maintain their desires to transition over long spans of time and put effort into presenting themselves in the world as their identified gender are rare. Like really really rare.
The recent Kansas decision to pull changed drivers licenses actually gave us some workable numbers on it. Apparently 1700 people are impacted by the decision, and chatgpt pulls up "Active driver’s licenses (most recent full year reported): 2,099,927 licenses."
That makes for less than one tenth of a percent of trans people who had the gender marker changed (assuming there wasn't even any data input false positives which at such rarity I wouldn't be surprised if errors was a significant number of them). Of course not every meaningfully trans person will have had a changed license, and perhaps many of them would have left Kansas before this anyway so there could be a selection effect but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people who actually meaningfully transition in that way.
The people who "find their identity" on Tiktok or Instagram or whatever and dye their hair weird colors and also tend to fake being DID/Autistic/tourettes/etc and are just generally "omg I'm so quirky" types seem to be in much greater abundance. Those types definitely seem to be more disproportionately the former explanation, that wanting to disconnect from negative associations with their sex can be a primary motivator for them. It's not the only one, after all they're "teehee I'm so quirky" types trying to stand out and be special in other ways, but it sure does seem to be true of many.
I don't really think the debate about gender is even that useful. As Ymeskhout wrote about the transgender sticker fallacy and Scott Alexander has wrote about before in categories were made for man, while the world might come from a divine power, words and labels don't. I have no issue acknowledging trans people as their identified gender so long as they are living generally within that space. Words and labels also can shift depending on context. In the context of giving birth, trans women are not women, but in the context of what section of the store they buy their clothes or what gender roles they try to match in society, they are. This applies to cis women as well, a woman born without a uterus is not a woman in the context of giving birth either, as it does not apply to them. Another way to look at it would be like a sticker of a door on a plastic car. In the context of opening and closing it as an entrance into the toy vehicle, it's not a door. In the context of appearances it is a door. Vice versa, a secret passage in a bookshelf is a door for the context of being an opening and closing entrance, but not a door in the context of appearance.
We see this right now with the Olympics banning people with the SRY gene. While it's definitely been touted in the media and online as a ban on trans people, the real world effect will almost entirely fall on the intersex competitors given the rarity of trans athletes at the Olympics (one in ~twenty years). Someone like Imane Khelif who for basically her whole life has lived in the context of being a woman, in a country that is very hostile and violent towards trans people too, is now considered not woman in the context of the Olympics and among many activists pushing for the ban. So Imane Khelif is in a state of flux, she's a woman according to one of the most trans hostile countries on the planet and has been that her whole life, and yet considered a man for the Olympics.
And chromosome arguments fall flat trying to reconcile this, because the idea of man and woman in society existed far before genetics and chromosomes were ever known about. A case like Khelif is not just considered a woman by Algeria, she would have been considered a woman by basically everyone in history before (at the very earliest) the 1900s when sex chromosomes were discovered. It can be argued that Khelif should count as a man in the context of the Olympics, but expanding that much further is actually against the traditional usage of these terms.
Regardless I agree with the end point, I think people (including children) should be allowed essentially maximal freedom to themselves (as long as it is of course, to themselves and not others) and if someone makes a mistake or fuckup then that is the price of freedom. Allowing the notion that big government has any moral claim to speak over me and my decisions and my autonomy is something I will not ever do. If someone gets addicted to drugs and dies, that is their fault. If someone overeats, that is their fault. If someone takes hormones or puberty blockers and then regrets it later, that is their fault. And when I do things I regret, that is my fault. If someone is too intellectually retarded to be held responsible for their own decisions, then they should be held in a mental hospital or the like. If paying privately, the most a doctor should really have to do is a consent form so it's known that the patient made their own choice and assurances against fraud (not providing the agreed upon treatments) and negligence. If paid by insurance then they meet the insurance standards too.
IMO an even more problematic issue that confounds all discussions about transgenderism is that trans people are treated as one group instead of being separated into people on autism spectrum and the rest. Every "non-famous" MTF person (ie. I've run into them in real life / specific FB groups / other forums in person instead of reading about them from some source) I know of are obviously on the spectrum, many of them are deeply weird in other ways and they have stereotypical hardcore male intellectual interests (to the extent that some tech groups have multiple orders of magnitude more MTF people than actual women). Not surprisingly none seem to have shown any indication of feeling "woman trapped in a man's body" as kids / teenagers / young adults. I have a hard time believing their experience or behavior matches particularly closely to the "modal" MTF group who felt they were born into the wrong gender from young age.
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I will caution that there's some selection effects going on: in addition to a lot of trans people going to the coasts, many Red Tribe states require or required significantly more documentation of interventions than one might expect. Kansas wasn't the most extreme, there - some other states mandated certain types of surgical intervention - but even before trans stuff became a culture war lightning rod, it was well-known to be enough of a hassle that even some eligible people dodged it.
The numbers in California are probably closer to 1-in-400.
Probably not a great example: there's been leaked information claiming Khelif to have 5a-reductase deficiency, which would have been detected as an (ironically, false) doping incident at least as of 1984.
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I would have thought that an obvious "common factor" in both identifying as a CSA survivor and identifying as non-cis would be "being left-wing".
Becoming left or right wing is downstream of other life experiences. It's more plausible that whatever common factor causes the other two things also causes the left-wing-ness.
I remember someone once describing the birth of an ideology as something that begins as a “pre-analytic cognitive act.” What that means in the political realm is that the former acts as the mental architecture and framework of understanding that emotionally colors and interprets particular experiences, which is independent of how experiences act back on us to form our views. Experiences no doubt shape other opinions and attitudes we have, but whether we’re left or right is rooted in something more fundamental, or perhaps the earliest life experiences we have as children. That’s certainly been true in my case.
My emotional disposition towards things and my political beliefs were formed far before I ever had a political awakening or became more learned as an adult. Everything since has been just backing into it after the fact with evidence and logical arguments to support my conclusions. There’s things I’ve ’learned’ over the years. Not things I’ve ‘changed’ though. Even when I really think I am earnest trying to understand others and am willing to be persuaded by their opinions, I’m mostly just not. That’s how I interpret the findings in cognitive psychology.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, but just in case you are I wanted to clarify that this "pre-analytic congnitive framework" that comes prior to politics, being a way to experience life, is one of those things I'd lump under "other-life-experiences." I'll moot discussing whether it's the specific life experience that determines reporting rates and non-cisgender-ness though. The phrase is general enough that I think we would get into a dictionary definition argument. A broad enough definition of the term would compel me to agree that it's the prior factor I'm talking about, but likely result in me complaining that it's so broad a definition as to be practically useless-- and a narrow enough definition to be useful would probably have me dithering about a lack of hard data to conclude if it's central.
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I can personally attest that my values/principles have been largely unchanged. What has changed has been my understanding of situations and how applying (or misapplying, given leftist theory!) those principles work. It's no secret the reason that leftist ideology sells/fails to be snuffed out so well is that the basic ideas seem so basically right. Looking at the way they were applied, however, completely changed my positions on many things. Some small examples of principle:
And how they were implemented:
These are simple examples, but they're good examples of how the world has changed around my principles.
Which is entirely the above thesis. It’s what we all do.
The root of the disagreement people have when statements like this are made depends entirely on what you think human beings are. When you hear things like “people should be free to do what they want,” an average person may here things like:
Same-sex marriage
Live wherever I want to
Drink alcohol
Smoke weed
Etc. When ‘I’ hear something like that, here’s what I think of:
Commit theft
Murder people
Sexually assault others
Vandalize property
Etc. Civilization isn’t a spontaneous creation that emerges naturally out of simple and uncoerced economic exchanges. Socioeconomic libertarianism isn’t enough to get you there. Constrained liberty is the best you can hope it. Small governments that only enforces contracts have a very short half life. In Basketball the ref’s have to be more powerful than the players otherwise what incentive is there for them to listen to them? Same applies with market participants and governments. Civil society requires enormous amounts of collective investment to build and uphold it. Leftism in theory nor in practice (which I’ll give them considerable ground in certain ways, I’m not a priori opposed to it) just has never worked to me, no matter how I examine it.
That's why I posted; I agree with you!
I'll clarify "in their personal lives with the consent of others". I'll stand by that as far as support for gay marriage.
I agree with your agreement!
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I think being a CSA survivor is itself a pretty major reason someone might grow up as strongly leftist, though (and, separately but compoundingly, that someone identifying as "a CSA survivor" in a survey is more likely to be left-wing than right-wing even assuming equal rates of actual experience of CSA between blue and left respondents). The therapists are woke, the books about coping with trauma are woke - if dealing with trauma is a huge part of your life then you'll grow up marinating in a generally left-wing worldview. And if you don't absorb that worldview you're less likely to continue identifying as "a CSA survivor" in adulthood - as opposed to compartmentalizing it away as just some shit in the past you don't need to think about, unlike all those fragile left-wing snowflakes who bootstrap themselves into chronic anxiety by fixating on their bad experiences.
So that gets us "CSA survivors are more likely to be left-wing"; and surely I don't need to justify the "left-wingers are more likely to question their gender" part of the chain of reasoning?
I don't think this explanation works.
2 and 3 contradict.
I admit that there probably is some relationship with therapy->liberalism->non-cisgenderism, but I don't think it's central.
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Personality type clearly has an impact on the likelihood of these unpleasant things occurring, which feels like an extraordinary taboo but which should be obvious.
I have a semi-friend, let’s say acquaintance, who has a personal narrative of being raped or trafficked by a much older man in her early teens, kind of like an Epstein situation although this man while rich was just a moderately successful man in his early 40s.
At the time (and I was there and the same age) she saw herself as an empowered, tumblr-driven “sugar baby”. I see her as a casualty of the sexual revolution more than anything else. She bragged about this relationship to all the girls. She sought it out, lying repeatedly about her age on the dating platforms of the late 00s and very early 2010s, and to the multiple older adult men she had sex with (and would again brag about this). She had no trauma at home (yes, one never knows for sure) and came from a wealthy and loving family with several siblings whom I know well.
At the time, her own close friends advised her against what she did, called her weird and various other less nice things. But while she was pretty and popular, she was not the prettiest or the most popular and I think in a way the attention from older men helped make up for that in her own head. As I said, I think a better world would have found ways of preventing her from doing what she did, and of preventing the men who did what they did to her from doing it.
But it also doesn’t sit right with me to absolve her of any responsibility, and it frustrates me when she (on the one occasion I have seen her in the last few years) narrates this chapter of her life as if she had zero agency, when everyone who was there knows that she had plenty of it.
To the extent that there is a distaff counterpart to "toxic masculinity" I feel like the sort of off-shoring of agency you describe here is a big part of it. I feel like as society has become more "feminized" I've see more of these situations where a failure clearly occurred but we can't just tell someone that they "failed" because really the failure was the fault of "systemic issues" and everyone following their individual incentives.
It’s because that attitude tends to make a moral argument out of everything, even when there’s nothing of the sort involved in the matter in any way whatsoever. I don’t even bother reasoning with people like that. I just let them sulk in their misery. They can’t grapple with any reality that makes them “uncomfortable.” The psychological resources just aren’t there that empower them to deal with the difficulties of life. You’re having to drag these people everywhere, kicking and screaming, no matter where they’re going.
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Top-tier Freudian slip.
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