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Did you read the "manifesto"? There was clearly much wrong with this person beyond anything to do with being trans. Do trans communities generally tell people they're "the ultimate human" and "better than everyone around me intelligence wise"?
And if the shooter had these beliefs not caused by being trans/hanging around in trans spaces, then could their other beliefs – such as that shooting up a school is a good idea – also have come from elsewhere?
(I will also say that it's amusing seeing them write how they're intellectually superior to everyone else because they are "fluent at [sic] English".)
This has always been the case, as with all other shooters. But this rhetorical charity is never extended to incels as a group. Just look at the hysteria "Adolescence" kicked off. A fictional 13yo boy fictionally killed his fictional classmate and everyone was acting like there was an actual irl pandemic of manosphere incels murdering your daughters, but statistically violence against women has been trending down over the years.
That was pure oppression pornography perpetrated by those who know in their hearts they deserve to get stabbed to death by spurned teenagers, though.
Or perhaps more charitably, they're rationally afraid of the only force that could actually hold them to account for what they have done at that group's expense.
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And the demographic to which the protagonist of Adolescence belongs is one of those least likely to commit it.
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Do you have a link?
A screenshot is in the first link in the top-level comment. Not the whole thing, but it does have the bit I was talking about.
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This is always the case with shooters. It is also always the case with trans people.
Whether trans is an extra violent subset of the persons who are very delusional and crazy is for researchers. Meanwhile, treating them akin to paranoid skitzophrenics is mostly appropriate via the precautionary principle. It is just as likely that a man is truly a woman as it is that a man's dog is satan and ordering him to kill people. Perhaps the latter is even more likely, many prominent philosophers of the ages have thought demons were real.
On the contrary, empirically, treating them as crazy and trying to make them not-trans makes them miserable and doesn't stop them from thinking they're trans, while treating them as their preferred gender and allowing them to medically transition lets most of them lead happy, fulfilling lives. The question of whether they are their preferred gender or should merely be treated as if they were is academic.
I've yet to see any rigorous studies showing that transition is helpful in reducing objective measurements like suicide, criminality, etc .
In any case the happiness of the trans is orthogonal to whether they are delusional, and the appropriate measures society takes to limiting the delusional population from committing acts of violence.
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That is not true, see elsewhere in this very thread that transition increases psychiatric morbidity. See also the 41% suicide rate of transitioners, which is not a sign of a mentally healthy population on average(after all, most depressives manage not to kill themselves).
I will have to push back on this one. My understanding is that this figure originated in an informal survey in which they asked trans people if they had ever attempted suicide (a heterogeneous category which includes hanging oneself and being interrupted, to overdosing on sleeping pills but fully expecting to be found i.e. "cries for help"). I don't think the survey separated out people who had medically transitioned from those who had not.
My understanding is that the suicide rate among trans people is not hugely different from the general population.
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Reading the study now. I'll respond to the original post later.
Well, on this one, you're blatantly wrong. First of all, it's a suicide attempt rate. Secondly, it's for all trans people, not just transitioners – including those who weren't able or allowed to transition, due to social or other circumstances. Also, the survey this figure comes from was conducted in 2011; a lot has changed in the meantime.
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On the contrary, there seems to be little to no evidence for this claim. Even Chase Strangio had to admit at the Supreme Court that there was no evidence that transitioning improved mental health outcomes.
Source?
Here.
Wow, what a cancerous website.
So, there is evidence it does improve mental health (suicidality being a component thereof), just no evidence it reduces the rate of successful suicides. You will note both my comment and yours talked about mental health, not the rate of successful suicides, which, as Strangio noted, are rare.
Can you link one of those studies that isn't hopelessly confounded, such as by taking massive losses to follow-ups?
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Trans communities do seem to pathologically validate, even when they're clearly wrong. That's what 'self ID' is.
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I mean if they were emotionally healthy, connected to real people in the real world, had lots of hobbies and interests outside of anime, online forums, social media, and probably gaming they wouldn’t have thought they were the übermensch and probably wouldn’t have thought the solution to people disagreeing with them was found in shooting up the Turkish equivalent of a junior high school. All of his beliefs are based to my mind in a profound separation from reality— his body, his identity, his overestimated view of his own superiority, his living in Anime to the point of name change is pretty much mentally unstable in itself. This person’s identity was uncoupled by spending so much time online that he had no idea that the real world wasn’t like his fantasy.
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No argument here. I believe the causal pathway looks like "mentally disturbed young man retreats into online spaces -> some of these spaces are trans spaces which contain violent, hateful rhetoric -> young man eventually comes to believe that he has no choice but to commit a mass shooting". The trans and the violent lashing out are ultimately downstream of the mental illness and social awkwardness.
As I've argued before:
Spend enough time in trans spaces and you'll see plenty of people arguing that trans women are outright superior to cis women, or that people who don't buy into gender ideology are hateful and backward.
Sure, they could have. I'm just fed up of the double standard. If he was a self-identified incel, that would have been the end of the story: no one would be going full internet forensics trying to find out what else might have radicalised him other than participation in incel communities. "He once liked an Andrew Tate video– case closed!" But no matter how much violent, hateful rhetoric they spew, online trans communities seem to be awarded an inexhaustible benefit of the doubt.
I've spent plenty of time in trans spaces and I haven't seen any of that.
Well, yeah, believing your political opponents are backward is par for the course, is it not? Do you not believe trans activists are backward?
"My political opponents are being uncharitable, so I'll be uncharitable back!" Many such cases. But isn't that against the rules on this website? And, you know, a bad thing in general?
I'm going to reply to @ZeStriderOfDunedain here since this is the same basic idea. He writes:
If the other side is being uncharitable or plain dishonest, point it out and ask them to be charitable and honest. Don't stoop to their level.
Well, lucky you, but I will admit I have a bit of a hard time believing this. "Die Cis Scum" was a meme over a decade ago. Trans Day of Vengeance? The avalanche of death and rape threats directed towards JK Rowling or Kellie-Jay Keen (the latter of whom was actually physically assaulted in public)? Assorted macabre, threatening protest placards like "The only good TERF is a ____ TERF"? SNP members photographed standing next to a placard reading "decapitate TERFs"? None of this ringing a bell?
Sometimes, not always. Communists usually strike me as either resentful or naïve, but not "backward" as such.
This was, ironically, a profoundly uncharitable reading of what I said. All I'm advocating is consistency. If we must trawl through the entire digital footprint of every trans mass shooter to determine exactly what it is that drove them to commit their horrific misdeeds, we should do the same with every mass shooter and resist the urge to buy into a simplistic narrative of their having been radicalised by Andrew Tate or whoever. I'm not advocating for trans criminals to be treated especially uncharitably, but rather for consistency in how criminals are treated regardless of their identity characteristics.
I, for one, am not stooping to their level. The claim that there is an epidemic of incel-motivated violence in the UK is simply untrue. I am unaware of even a single case of a young man in the UK murdering someone after being radicalised by incel/manosphere content. While there has been incel-motivated violence outside of the UK, the scale of it has been greatly exaggerated. Contrary to PM Keir Starmer's claims, Adolescence was not a documentary, nor even based, however loosely, on a true story. I did not describe the content of a fictional Turkish miniseries as if it had anything to say about the real world. I rather resent your implication that there is no moral difference between a) reading too much into a real case that actually happened and b) producing a fictional miniseries about a problem that does not exist and using it as a cudgel with which to beat an entirely blameless demographic.
It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least three mass shootings committed by trans people so far this year. It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least eight mass shootings or killing sprees committed by trans people so far this decade. It hardly seems unreasonable for me to infer that a pattern seems to be emerging here, nor that it might be worth investigating what commonalities the perpetrators might have besides their gender identities.
While trans-motivated violence has claimed more lives this decade (and probably this century) than incel-motivated violence, in the linked post I went out of my way to point out that the former is still small in absolute terms, and a drop in the bucket compared to e.g. Islamist terrorism – this is, to my mind, exactly the opposite of the hysterical scaremongering seen in the incel debate. I am not demanding that Netflix produce an arty miniseries about a trans person who commits a mass shooting, nor that every British teenager be made to watch it. While I have my disagreements with trans activists, I don't recall ever urging people to beat them up or decapitate them. I am not stooping to my opponents' level, and it's repugnant of you to suggest that I am.
I did think of this, but I thought it was obvious that it was a joke. Do you seriously believe trans people want the 99% of the human population who are cis to be exterminated?
Spicy rhetoric, yes, but I don't see any actual calls for violence. The event, which was cancelled, was supposed to be peaceful protest.
This is not about trans people specifically, but in general, I find it odd that people talk about "death and rape threats" as if they were actual, credible threats, and not, you know, just a thing a random anonymous person wrote online. I imagine these are boomers taking these things seriously, people who grew up before the internet. This applies just as much to the alleged victims of Gamergate, to trans people who receive such "threats", etc.
No, I hadn't heard of her having tomato juice poured on her. The perpetrator was convicted. Was there widespread sympathy for the perpetrator among trans people?
No, I hadn't seen any of those, either. Perhaps the problem is that I hung out in trans spaces – places where trans and questioning people talk to each other and the odd curious observer like me – and not at public events where the rhetoric is meant for the general public. You'd think they'd want to tone things down for the public, and be forthright about their ill intentions in more trans-focused spaces, but in fact, in the latter, I've seen zero calls for any kind of actual violence.
But, in general, I'm sure you could cherry-pick a similar amount of violent rhetoric if you looked at the fringes of anti-trans activism. (One that comes to mind is the emote of a trans person being hanged on rdrama.net. "Trannies get the rope" gets 196 hits on Google – and that's just one, highly specific phrase.) In neither case is it representative.
You seemed to be advocating for consistency in the opposite direction: that trans people and incels should both be treated as violent threats to society. If you agree that both are overblown as a whole, and that individual cases should be examined individually, then we are in agreement.
I don't know, arguing over which is worse seems a bit pointless. Can we agree both are bad?
Tumbler Ridge and Turkey, what's the third one?
Eight events in the entire world is not enough to suggest a pattern of any kind, given that there are tens of millions of trans people in the world.
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Sure, and if we simply joined hands together and sang kumbaya we might unlock world peace. This is a meta level observation on the discrepancy in interpretive rigour. One domain demands extreme nuance, while the other is a closed case. If the shooter is trans, you must pussyfoot around their gender dysphoria, use polite language, trace their psychology with maximum granularity, and absolutely never generalise. This tells me that the "other side" does possess the critical thinking skills and understanding of basic human psychology necessary to recognise the complex pathways from social alienation to real world violence. So when they don't extend these complexities to the "manosphere" or incel adjacent spaces, and instead treat their alleged behaviours as deterministic, self-evident and ideologically settled, as well as silence alternative explanations that may deviate from their "right-think" priors, that is a conscious choice.
Charity is a two-way road.
You are just repeating that they are being dishonest. That you should be dishonest in turn is a non sequitur. Again, why not point out their dishonesty and double standards and be better than them? At least on this website, if in the real world you feel a need to act dishonestly for pragmatic political reasons.
"Look your reasoning is flawed and collapses rather quickly under the standards you reserve for your own sacred cows" is not me advocating for tit-for-tat dishonesty, I'm simply echoing their own framework. Again, this is a meta-level observation about the discourse, not the shooting itself (which, to be clear, I agree extends beyond the shooter's gender dysphoria). So I'm not sure what dishonesty it is that you think I'm defending. Unless you believe that my meta-level observation itself is quite dishonest, in which case, please enunciate how and why.
Do you believe incel/manosphere attackers should receive the benefit of the doubt, i.e., their attacks should not be attributed to them being incels/part of the manosphere?
At minimum, you need to demonstrate a consistent and reproducible pattern showing engagement with online spaces as the causal driver of violent attacks, holding all other factors constant.
Tangentially, video game violence may have played a role in cases like Daniel Petric, but millions of people spend long hours gaming globally without exhibiting real world violence, so you have a much harder time arguing that any single factor in isolation drives such outcomes. And yes, I extend that logic to trans shooters as well.
As for the manosphere, Andrew Tate literally got streisand effected to fame. He had less than 4M followers on Twitter/X when he started making headlines around 2022. He's sitting at 11M now.
If we were to believe the narrative, that surge in visibility and consumption should be coupled by a corresponding uptick in violence against women, and that this uptick can be reasonably traced to his content. Instead, violent crime is trending down in both the US and UK.
I agree with the gist of your post. I just want to comment on:
A person with 3M+ followers on Twitter is not a nobody. The Streisand effect may well have contributed somewhat, but that kind of growth in four years isn't unusual.
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If it can be clearly established that the perpetrator of a mass shooting or similar spent a great deal of time in incel/manosphere spaces which pushed him to do something heinous, then that mass shooting should be attributed to the perpetrator being an incel or manosphere adherent. I have zero problem characterising e.g the Isla Vista incident as an example of incel-motivated violence.
But I think there's a clear double standard in which attacks get attributed to which ideologies/communities in the progressive media: that a terror attack is Islamist must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, while preponderance of evidence (if even that) is all that is required to "prove" that a given mass shooting is incel/manosphere/far-right. If a mass shooter is known to have watched one Andrew Tate video, that will go in the lede, while the years of mental illness will be glossed over if mentioned at all. Meanwhile, it's a cliché for progressive journalists to announce that "no motive could be established" for a mass stabbing incident even when the perpetrator was heard bellowing "Allahu Akbar" during the attack. I believe this double standard also extends to mass shootings committed by trans people: progressive journalists seem alarmingly reluctant to acknowledge that the pattern even exists, still less to ask hard questions about the kinds of content the perpetrators may have consumed prior to their attacks and whether there's any causal relationship.
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