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I'm in the same position. I would love to just wait for the trans fad to blow over (as long as we minimize the long-term harm to kids - THAT'S something I truly can't ignore). Unfortunately I'm a shut-in whose only socialization comes from various online videogame and puzzle and rationalist circles... and they are absolutely rampant with trans activists (and far-left activists in general). My experience with them has been dreadful.
There's a giant yearly puzzle event that's run at MIT, and I used to be on a particular team. I didn't have a lot in common with them, except that we all liked math. Actually, most of them came from a math club whose emeriti included, um, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison (cough). But this was enough to unite us. ...Until around 7-8 years ago when the social contagion factor really kicked in, and now 40% of them are trans and another 30% various other flavours of sexual activist. And one year we were doing the puzzle event, and the people running it made the mistake of making one of the events a funny riff on a gender-reveal party. Long story short, it ended in the organizers - who were volunteers who had spent a year of their life working hard to bring us this free event - visiting and tearfully (yes, literally) apologizing to us for their thoughtcrime. It felt almost like a struggle session. I was absolutely disgusted with our team, and I never felt comfortable around them since.
Even though I've since switched teams, the problem is endemic almost everywhere I go. Want to watch people solve sudokus on Twitch? You're 50% likely to hit a stream plastered with LGBT and trans and various other sexual tags (and they're all talking to each other, so you'd better not inform the guy with a male voice and a big-breasted avatar that he looks ridiculous). There are puzzle Discords that I'm on that I rely on to find good puzzles, but Discord servers are closed, controlled, ephemeral communities - the opposite of the old ideal of the Internet - and I will lose this access if I ever let a hint out of my actual centrist politics. (I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't happened already; at some point maybe people will connect my Motte posts with me, it's not like my identity is disguised.)
People often think of "The Emperor's New Clothes" as an inspirational fable, where the innocent child saves everyone from their plight. But in real life, it would not end well for the child. I try to be a genuine rationalist. I want to be able to say things that are true. And I'm simply not able to in any of my social interactions. It eats away at my soul.
The apology from the organizers at that club sounds ridiculous, but it's the only anecdote you actually mention to justify your idea that "your experience with [trans activists] has been dreadful". All the rest of your post is just complaining that you meet a lot of them, and possibly that they, uh, don't tend to like it when you tell them they're "ridiculous" out of the blue?… I don't mean this as an insult, but it's hard to avoid the impression that what fundamentally feels unbearable to you is their sheer existence in your vicinity, not anything egregious that they actually do.
Yes, I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality (especially very weird sexuality). This used to be considered normal. And now I am not allowed to voice this preference, lest people like you call me a bigot. (You very clearly did mean it as an insult.) But I don't think you read "the rest of my post", because I clearly mentioned that I will lose access to my hobby if I ever inadvertently expose my true feelings. That's a rather different kind of dreadful than "gosh I sure hate that these people exist".
I meant it as a reasoned accusation of inconsistency in your argument - you tried to justify your rancor as based on specific "dreadful experiences" with trans activists, then failed to actually prove this claim. I take the point that your complaint is the fear of "losing access to your hobby if [you] ever inadvertently expose [your] true feelings" but that's still not an actual lived experience, just an assumption about a hypothetical scenario. I don't think your post was honest. If your genuine complaint is that you find it extremely uncomfortable existing in the vicinity of trans people, at a basic vibes level, then don't act like your actual problem is a particular subclass of "activists" behaving in specific dreadful ways! By your new, more honest claim, you'd still be extremely uncomfortable with having to share your hobbies with totally apolitical trans streamers and gamers who gave you no indication that they'd cancel you for your opinions.
(Also, I think you are wrong that trans people are "people who make everything about their sexuality". I know too many asexual trans people not to laugh that claim out of the room. I have too many relatives who I just don't buy are incestuously involving me in a kink by asking me to use their new pronouns. But I grant you that if you're talking about an instinctive "ick" you can't suppress, rather than a rational position, this doesn't necessarily make a difference - if it feels sexual to your lizard brain, it is what it is. I can sympathize: I find the sight of people with piercings very uncomfortable, no matter how many times my higher consciousness repeats to my empathy reflex that the other monkey doesn't actually have a dirty nail driven into its flesh.)
Well, not all of them, but let's say a disproportionate share. I've met hundreds of women in my life, and to the best of my knowledge not one has ever left the house wearing a T-shirt with the word "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it. I do, however, know a trans-identified male (whom I'll call Dave) who has done this several times. Dave was doing a Secret Santa thing in work, for which the company was using a website in which you could add items to your wishlist and they would be visible only to the person assigned to be your Secret Santa. Dave requested a mug with the words "I LOVE GIRL COCK" emblazoned across it. One of her colleagues complained to a mutual friend that this was profoundly inappropriate conduct for a workplace. ("He ain't persecuted, he just a asshole.")
To the best of my knowledge, Dave has never been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, gave no indication of a desire to transition as a child, and only came out as trans in his mid-twenties. Prior to coming out, Dave admitted to a close friend (who in turn mentioned it to me) that he was consuming so much pornography that he was debating whether, morally, he really ought to financially support the "content creators" thereof. I have a very hard time believing Dave's pornography consumption is wholly unrelated to his subsequent trans identification. I would go so far as to say that I don't think Dave identifies as a "woman" so much as he identifies as the hypersexualised portrayal of femininity which exists in porn and nowhere else. Women in real life don't wear "CUM SLUT" T-shirts, but women in porn certainly do.
Another example. Before we met, my girlfriend once worked as a tour guide in her home country, in which role she met a much older (i.e. retired) trans-identified male from an English-speaking country, whom I'll call Charlie. Literally the first time my girlfriend met Charlie, Charlie admitted that he'd fully medically transitioned, and asked my girlfriend if she'd be interested in seeing his neovagina. I believe they'd known each other for all of an hour.
I know, I know, generalising from a small sample size, Chinese robber fallacy, yeah yeah yeah. But I'd appreciate it if you could answer the following questions in complete honesty. Do you know any female people who habitually walk around in public wearing a T-shirt with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it? Do you know any female people who think it's appropriate workplace conduct to anonymously ask one of their colleagues to buy them a coffee mug reading "I LOVE COCK"? Do you know any female people who consume so much pornography (and so often) that they're debating whether they ought to financially support the companies or individuals who produce it? In your experience, when a female person meets another female person for the first time, do they typically expose their genitalia to one another? In your opinion, what is the difference between what Charlie proposed doing to my girlfriend and what Louis CK was cancelled over?
Like, when you have Pulitzer Prize-winning trans journalists openly admitting that they became trans as a direct consequence of watching too much "sissy hypno" porn, I think the cat is out of the bag. I'm not saying every trans-identified male is a pornsick fetishist (indeed, per Blanchard's typology I suspect that the homosexual variety has a completely different etiology to the autogynephiliac). But I am saying that trans-identified males are disproportionately likely to be pornsick fetishists when compared to males in general (and especially when compared to the females these TIMs supposedly identify as), and that this goes double for the terminally online trans-identified males which it sounds like @SnapDragon was interacting with.
And as an aside, I find it a profound insult to my intelligence that I'm expected to believe that males like this "identify as women" or have an "internally felt sense of womanhood", when it's abundantly obvious to everyone that they are performing a misogynistic caricature of femininity that owes more of its particulars to Hugh Hefner and MindGeek than it does to any actual flesh-and-blood woman. I can't imagine how offensive I'd find it if I was a woman and I was expected to nod along with this and pretend that I believe that wearing a "CUM SLUT" T-shirt is just the sort of thing women do, that there are no meaningful differences between me and a male person wearing a T-shirt like that.
And if, after all of the foregoing, you still want to accuse me of Chinese robbering, then fine, I accept that. But at least meet me halfway and acknowledge that, even if not all trans-identified males behave anything like the above, it is perfectly reasonable (and not bigoted or hateful) to be creeped out by males who do behave like the above, even if they identify as trans, and that they should not get a pass on their inappropriately sexual behaviour just because of how they "identify".
Ironically, and I don't know whose case this helps if anyone's - I do, but they're biological females who identify as male. (No, not my trans relative. I know multiple FTMs.)
I do know of the type of trans woman you describe, but I still think parsing their lifestyle as a sex thing is reductive. For a start, many of them consider themselves lesbians - that is to say, they are, in biological terms, heterosexual - so I don't really buy that they get a sexual thrill from being acknowledged as women by men. Mostly, I think it's a combination of the queer community having relaxed sexual mores, and of biological males starting out hornier than the average biological female, but suddenly unlearning all the specifically male norms that cause men to disguise and obfuscate anything to do with their raw sexuality.
'Bob' is perhaps a different matter if she really was so taken with pornography, but 'Charlie' seems a very good example of the kind of thing I mean: boys in a state of nature love showing their willies to people, including straight boys showing theirs off to other straight boys. The only reason men don't do it to women is that society teaches them it's very, very rude indeed. (Perhaps ruder than it actually is, I daresay, but then, as I said, I have naturist leanings at a philosophical level, though the actual hobby has never appealed to me.) Now here comes 'Charlie', who, because she now holds herself to be a woman socially, no longer feels bound by the "it's very rude for a man to ask women if they want to see his willy" rule. But neither is she especially aware of a "it's very rude for a woman to ask women if they want to see her foofoo" rule; even if she knows of one, she'd would write it off as patriarchal prudishness. So the exchange you witnessed ensues.
I don't want to claim that the boyish impulse to show off one's cool willy is a wholly non-sexual one, or that this end result is okay; but I think it'd be wrong to necessarily treat expressions in trans women's behavior of this kind of spontaneous exhibitionism, or even more explicit male-style horniness, as a specific form of fetishism, or to conclude that they're sneakily getting off all the time just from being perceived as female.
(I don't deny that some trans women arrive at their decisions through sexual fantasies; but I don't think this means that their subsequent female identification need be a purely sexual thing, in much the same way that attraction between two people can start as sexual desire and blossom into the full spectrum of romantic love. You might put on a dress because you think it's hot, then look at yourself in the mirror, and realize, oh wait, this feels right, I want this even when I don't have an erection. It might be helpful to think of a certain kind of transition as a process of falling in love with a person you're becoming.)
Oh, the perfect-platonic-essence-of-gender-written-on-your-soul approach isn't my position either.
You know, I have a very hard time believing that a heterosexual male (that is, a member of the sex responsible for a good >90% of indecent exposure arrests and unsolicited photos of their genitals sent to people they barely know) has wholly innocent reasons for inviting a female person to inspect his genitals within an hour of meeting her, even if he has maimed said genitals beyond recognition. I think you would interpret Charlie's behaviour much less charitably if he did not purport to identify as a woman, and I don't think this is at all warranted. "I identify as a woman" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card to act like a creep and a sex pest.
Yes, it would be wrong to conclude that they're doing it sneakily. Plenty of them make no secret of it.
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I think you are being dishonest. Nowhere in his post (or mine) did we indicate that we are uncomfortable with trans people "existing in our vicinity."
See, this is exactly what I am talking about. You pretend that it's all about irrational "icks" and that trans people aren't actually doing anything. Are you seriously denying that to reveal an "ick" (and I don't mean by declaring something offensive, just revealing with a slip of the tongue that you don't really think of someone as female or that you aren't wholeheartedly onboard with Trans Rights Are Human Rights) has social consequences? Do you think someone deserves to lose their social circle for not being properly aligned?
You say we're imagining hypothetical scenarios. Come on. If you pay any attention to left leaning hobby spaces ( which is almost all hobby spaces) you know it's not hypothetical what happens to someone who says JK Rowling isn't a monster, actually.
As for being inappropriately sexual, I believe you that you know lots of asexual trans people. Do you believe me that most trans people I know dress or behave in off-puttingly sexual ways, at least occasionally, in a way that seems intended to test boundaries and tolerance? Do you think this common experience is something us "transphobes" make up?
Not in SnapDragon's original post - but SnapDragon's original post began with a claim that "[his] experience with them has been dreadful". And then most of the post amounted to listing all the spaces in which he encounters a high percentage of trans people, without actual elaboration on what made his personal experience with them "dreadful". This naturally led me to suspect that it was the sheer experience of interacting with them which he deemed "dreadful", rather than any particular objectionable behavior on their part - making the framing of the argument as "I'm only so worked up about trans people because they've been awful to me" deceitful.
I'm not saying that the worry over hypothetical scenarios where SnapDragon is ostracized for gender-critical views is paranoid or irrational. But I don't think it's honest to start with "my experiences with trans activists have been dreadful", and, when pressed, admit that in fact nothing dreadful has happened to you, you're just constantly afraid that it might. Imagine a black activist saying he's only anti-white because of his personal "dreadful experiences" with white people, but, when questioned, he admits that he just means the stress of interacting with random white people with a constant background fear that they're violent racists who'll beat him up if he ever accidentally does something to offend them. I think this would be disingenuous even if we imagine our activist living in a genuinely very racist town, where that fear isn't actually irrational. He hasn't had that experience. He just hasn't.
Moreover, I took SnapDragon's reply as agreeing that he ultimately felt an "ick" about interacting with trans people ("I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality", where, FWIW, I glossed him as equating being trans with making everything about your sexuality, not just saying that a lot of trans people happen to be over-sexed). I'm not accusing all transphobes/GCs of only being motivated by such an ick; but SnapDragon's first post gave the impression that he, in particular, was, and his second post seemed to confirm it explicitly.
Hence:
I believe you, but this is a completely different claim from the claim that being trans is inherently a sex thing and therefore discomfort with being surrounded by trans people is justifiable as discomfort with people being off-puttingly sexual in your personal space without your consent - which is what I took SnapDragon to be saying.
If he has justified fear that it might, that counts as a dreadful experience, because he has actually seen things that have good reason to make him afraid, and seeing and reacting to those things count as experiences. Your hypothetical black shouldn't be talking about his dreadful experiences because he made up the cause of the fear inside his head and the fear is not actually justified.
I don't see "being trans is in practice a sex thing" as very different from "being trans is inherently a sex thing". At least in practice it's not very different.
But that's not Amadan's claim. Amadan claims to know a lot of transgenders whom he finds over-sexual in their demeanor. I granted this claim; but it still leaves us with the fact that I know a very different sub-population of trans people than he does (so at most you should only conclude "being trans is in practice a sex thing for some").
Neither does it prove, for that matter, that transness itself is a sex thing even to the over-sexed transgenders that Amadan knows; there are many subcultures whose members are a lot more promiscuous than the general population, it doesn't mean that the subculture's anchor-point is itself a sexual fetish. At the broadest possible level, liberals are more likely to be sexually liberated than conservatives, even to outré extents, but that hardly makes liberalism itself "a sex thing" even "in practice".
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Sigh. @Amadan summed things up perfectly, but for the record:
Okay, but you didn't actually specify the trans people active in your hobbies as doing any of those things in the actual post. The closest was the idea that word would spread if you told a transfem streamer she was "ridiculous" for having a female avatar over her natural male-sounding voice - but I don't think that people giving you the cold shoulder if you call them "ridiculous" unprovoked amounts to "threatening heretics". If I tell a Christian that their belief in sky-fathers is ridiculous while they're hosting an unrelated activity, I can expect to be kept at arms' length by other Christians in that activity's community, but that doesn't mean the Spanish Inquisition is back.
I also note that the list of dreadful experiences has suddenly expanded from "threaten heretics" to also include mentioning their transness too frequently and dressing in ways you don't like; if we separate them out from the fear of being ostracized should you react poorly to those things, as you seemingly do by listing them on their own, what is it that actually bothers you about those things, if it isn't an ick?
Imagine you have a young woman, Alice, who works in an office and reports to an older man named Bob. Bob makes little secret of his sexual attraction to Alice, which is not reciprocated. Bob never touches Alice in an inappropriate way, or sexually propositions her, or makes inappropriately sexual jokes in her presence etc. However, he begins wearing shorts into the office with loose-fitting boxer shorts underneath them. When talking to Alice, he tends to rest his foot on filing cabinets or angles his legs in such a way that his genitals are visible to Alice, if only just. It is abundantly obvious that he is intentionally exposing himself to Alice, but with plausible deniability. (If you want an illustration of what I'm talking about, watch this clip from Friends, except that the man in this clip is completely unaware of what he's doing.)
In your opinion, would Alice be justified in finding Bob's behaviour inappropriate, off-putting or creepy, if not actually qualifying as sexual harassment in its own right? And would your answer change if Bob "identified as" Barbara, but his genitals were unchanged?
Or supposing, to return to an example in a previous comment, Bob began to come into the office wearing a T-shirt with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it. Or if he began coming into work wearing enormous prosthetic breasts under his sweater. Would it be reasonable of Alice to find either of those off-putting or creepy?
@Amadan and @SnapDragon described the trans people (let's be honest: trans-identified males – no one is claiming trans-identified females behave like this*) they knew dressing in "intentionally provocative" and "off-puttingly sexual" ways. I don't know exactly what kind of dress they were referring to. But I think it's fair to assume they were not complaining about these people wearing plaid despite paisley suiting them so much better. Glossing their complaint as amounting to the trans people in question "dressing in ways they don't like" is an uncharitable strawman, and it's really obnoxious.
*Which is not what one would naïvely expect, given that trans-identified females purport to identify as members of the sex which experiences a vastly higher sex drive and commits a hugely disproportionate share of rape and sexual assault.
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That’s not a fair comparison. I preferred the comparison to a Black person among white people, although that one isn’t perfect either. In my experience, Christians and Black people generally don’t test others to see whether they hold haram beliefs, whereas trans people and trans-friendly communities routinely test whether you agree with them. For example, I once felt tested through a joke, where my reaction seemed to be examined to see whether I laughed along. Another time, I was asked directly about JKR and Harry Potter. I’ve never had similar experiences with Black people or Christians, despite knowing far more of them than trans people.
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It's being forced to participate in a blatant, obvious lie that literally every human being in history except 5 weird tribes in the middle of nowhere would recognise as a lie.
If it were publicly sayable and reified that trans people are insane and think they're the wrong gender, the existence of trans people in the vicinity would be broadly okay. One would feel sorry for them, but not necessarily feel compelled to say so to their face. The fact that there has been a vast activist-indoctrination effort to punish people who don't play along is what people find uncomfortable.
I've discussed before elsewhere but it's incredibly unpleasant to interact closely with a trans person in a Blue workplace, consciously choosing every day to lie because you're a coward who's afraid to be thrown out of the program you've invested years of work into, dreading the day when you slip up and absent-mindedly call the squeaky-voiced 5ft person who was a girl six months ago 'her'.
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