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Notes -
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.)
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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