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Thanks! Maybe I’m a bit oblivious but I don’t detect that much hostility towards me personally, in fact many times I’ve been disappointed that I can’t seem to get into a proper argument with a gender critical person.
I’ve been happy to criticise them here I think, and I’m no different in real life.
I’m perfectly fine with you admitting that you don’t think I’m a woman. I might try to convince you that between “a woman is an adult female human that produces large gametes” and “a woman is anyone who says they are one”, there’s other definitions that have some usefulness.
Going back to this site’s rationalist roots, I feel like Big Yud’s classic post on bleggs and rubes applies here. Like what are you saying when you say you don’t think I’m a woman? Is it “for me, women refers to adult female humans, and you’re not in that category”, is it “I can’t override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy”, is it “I will not behave towards you the way I behave towards women because that goes against my beliefs”?
I feel like both the pro-trans and anti-trans camps are acting as if the debate is just about who gets to have the woman category and the man category, and then all the rest, prisons, sports, bathrooms, labelling sexual attraction, will magically get resolved.
Is a man gay for being attracted to a trans woman? No, because trans women are women! Yes, because trans women are biologically male! Well, both of those answers are kinda stupid, and are the result of ideologies trying to force reality into man-made categories instead of trying to find the actual question.
Because if you define gay as “person with XY chromosomes attracted to another person with XY chromosomes”, it’s not necessarily wrong, but it might not be useful. You’re going to get into scenarios just as absurd as defining gay as “person who says they’re a man, attracted to a person that says they’re a man”, where you can be a man insisting he’s straight while enthusiastically sucking the dick of someone that looks just like a hairy bearded man because “Hey, she’s a pre-transition MtF and trans women are women!” or “Hey, she’s an adult female human, still a woman even if she got phalloplasty, top surgery, has been on testosterone for 20 years and is in the top 1st percentile of height for women!”
Well, what does it mean for you to be caught out? Is it them flat out asking questions, like “do you think trans women belong in men’s prisons” or “what did you think of Lia Thomas?” and waiting expectantly for you to say the politically correct answer? That’s shitty behaviour and I’m sorry if that’s been your primary kind of interaction with trans people.
Maybe it’s a social circle difference, maybe it’s a European thing, but the trans people I know, myself included, don’t do this. In real life, I never introduce myself with my pronouns or whatever, I don’t talk about being trans, or related political issues, unless I’m explicitly asked. In a perfect world I wouldn’t even be trans, and I’m immensely grateful that I have many relationships where it just does not come up, ever.
So this is actually a profoundly monstrous argument.
If you take this to its logical extreme, this is literally saying "there are things that are true and there are things that are useful. We should focus on the things that are more useful."
Cue the hyper cut to soviet pogroms, concentration camps, khmer rouge, whatever.
Normies will look at semantic word games like "it depends on how you define that" and "what are you saying when you say you don’t think I’m a woman?" and simply roll their eyes, I get incensed by them because that slipperiness not with the truth but with the relative importance of the truth to utility is how you unlock the gates of Hell.
You know I just restated Scott’s famous post The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For the Categories right?
It’s completely absurd to suggest that caring that definitions be useful - i.e. carve reality at the joints - means you have to care less about whether they’re true or not. Obviously, definitions need to be both true and useful!
“Normies” just aren’t aware of fuzzy and imprecise human language is! I’m a software developer and I deal with that all the time when trying to communicate with non technical people. It’s not word games when you’re trying to do engineering, or law, or anything else that requires translating the fuzzy concepts and tonnes of assumptions that come with human language,
You misunderstand me completely if you think I hold truth secondary to utility, my point is that labels are not the truth and that the words we use daily are more probabilistic than discrete which is why all the neat linguistic theories and clever NLP algorithms have largely been supplanted by statistical approaches in practice.
If you don’t accept that, you are the one denying the truth, and confusing the map for the territory.
And
Pick one.
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May I ask what you're looking for? The term 'gender critical' can cover a lot of ground - in general I read it as 'gender-critical feminist', and you're certainly not going to find many of those around here. But if you mean people critical of 'gender ideology' in the broad sense, we probably have a lot, though I fear maybe a bit too spittle-flecked for useful discussion.
If it would be interesting, I suppose I'm gender-critical in the sense that I think the broad category of 'gender ideology' is mistaken. I am sympathetic towards the desire to be compassionate to people who suffer gender-related pain or angst, but as an anthropology I think it's limited and probably has done a significant amount of harm. I suppose I think that trans, as an issue, is linked to a larger trend of rejecting any un-chosen identity in human life, and viewing people and identity as fundamentally malleable? Once you get away from the usual hot-spots like sports, prisons, toilets, etc., and start digging into the larger philosophical question about what it means to be human, I think the conversation gets fascinating.
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Maybe you aren't trying hard enough! But seriously, it's probably partly that our rules prevent anyone who genuinely despises trans people (of whom I am sure there are some here who fit into that category) from really unloading on you, and partly because "gender critical" usually refers specifically to a particular brand of radical feminism, which is also not too popular here. Unless you are using it more broadly to mean the same thing as "trans critical." ("Gender critical" feminists are not just "anti-trans," though - they are critical of the entire concept of gender roles and innate "gender" which is distinct from biological sex.)
That's cool, but like most people on the Motte, you are probably quite outside the norm. Now would you actually defend someone who is facing a cancel mob for expressing trans-critical views?
It is mostly the first two. I realize "I can't override the part of my brain that sees you as a guy" is not a rational basis on its own to deny someone's identity, but it is certainly a rational basis to... not react to you the way I would to a woman, whether that be socially, sexually, in terms of threat perception, etc. And saying that I should because my brain does not get to overrule your self-identification is basically demanding that I ignore my instincts and evolutionary hardwiring and defer to something I have only your word for. To be clear, I am not claiming that you are asserting something ridiculous like "If I think I am a hot woman, you should perceive me as a hot woman." But it does to lead to situations like trans women accusing lesbians of transphobia if they can't override their brains and see trans women as women.
As for "adult female humans," yes, I do think a woman is basically an adult human female, and every edge case or exception you will offer is something I have heard already and does not convince me. The fact that there exists a tiny percentage of people who aren't easily classified into a sexual binary because of physical, chromosomal, or other abnormalities does not mean humans are not a sexually dimorphic species. Such arguments have always struck me as not unlike claiming that humans are not bipeds because some people are born without legs.
So, yes, if you were born with XY chromosomes and a penis, then I'm sorry, you're a dude. You can present as female as you like and live as a female and for social purposes, I'm happy to let you do that, but you're still a dude, and my internal mental state for you will always be "dude".
As for all the various combinations of sexual attraction you propose, I am also happy to concede some people might be more sexually fluid than they acknowledge, but again, a bunch of edge cases testing "But what if you're attracted to him? What if you're attracted to her?" does not prove anything about someone's actual sex.
Yes. Yes, she is. Even if she passes. Does it matter, if 99% of the people she meets never know she's not a man? Probably not to her. But she's still a female.
Generally speaking, no, I have not had trans people ask me such obvious interrogatory questions. It's more like "Well, you know I won't be watching the new Harry Potter HBO series because I refuse to support a transphobe (looks around meaningfully)." Or an obese man in drag lecturing us (men, not including himself in that category of course) about sexual harassment and women's safety. Or casual assertions about trans genocide, how dangerous some red state is for trans people, how all their rights are being taken away (because some sports organization just banned trans women in women's sports), etc. And my choices are (1) Nod affirmatively, (2) Say nothing (slightly less cowardly, slight chance of being noticed), (3) Say "Well Actually..." and bang! You're a transphobe!
For the most part, my interactions with trans people have not been "dreadful" as @SnapDragon put it. As I said, they are usually chill. But it's a regular series of... can I say "micro-aggressions," only somewhat ironically? Sexual innuendos, constant reminders of how trans they are, something dropped about JK Rowling or Trump. Nothing that a non-trans person might not also say, but you just notice it comes from them with greater than average frequency and there is always a sense that they are watching to see who reacts and how.
And from a non-trans person, if someone is annoying me with their pet hobby horse, I might be free to say "Give it a rest, come on," or if that would be overly aggressive for the situation, I would at the very least only suffer a smirk and a snort if I were to roll my eyes. But with a trans person... Tag.
I'm being vague here because I don't want to be more specific, you know? But take my word for it: I know some trans people, and they are mostly okay, but sometimes they Do and Say Things that really make me want to Say Things in response, and I don't because there would be Consequences that aren't worth it to me.
Are cancel mobs still a thing on the left in America? I thought the balance of power had shifted.
But in any case, I’ve never known anybody to face a cancel mob (I don’t think it’s really a thing where I live, and there’s stronger employment laws than in the states) so it’s hard to say how brave I would be. I suppose it depends on the situation, like I’ve personally defended a friend who was accused of transphobia at work, and if we were at a rationalist conference or whatnot I would come to your defence if you got a lot of flack for saying the same kind of things you just posted, even if I disagreed with what you said.
See this is why I don’t like the modern trans movement, because somehow they’ve convinced everyone that being trans is all about how you “identify” as, and that people should treat you based entirely on your self-ID.
If you’ve only been around that kind of trans people, I get why you have a negative impression and a hard time going beyond “I’ll respect your pronouns but won’t think of you mentally as the opposite sex”. But for some of us, the goal is to get treated and seen as the opposite sex by actually passing, not by asking other people to overrule their instincts or whatnot based on a pronoun badge.
Not everyone can pass of course, and I get the focus on respecting people’s pronouns because that’s an easy intervention doesn’t cost much and works for all trans people, and the idea of trying to normalise being a non passing trans person in a gendered space, because it’s unfair that some trans people get lucky with their appearance and some don’t.
And if you clock me easily and can’t shake off the feeling of “male”, that’s fine. I’d much prefer you admit it instead of treating me as a woman in an overly performative way while not actually believing it (as many in the woke camp do).
Sure, I don’t disagree. But if you have someone that looks like a hairy bearded man with a penis, both the pro-trans woke camp and the trans critical side are saying it’s somehow possible for a straight man to be attracted to them, either because the hairy bearded man is a trans woman and trans women are women, or because they’re a trans man and straight men are into biological female.
Both sound equally ridiculously to me, being gay/straight is obviously based on how the person looks, otherwise you could make a straight man get turned on watching bara hentai just by adding a footnote that the characters have XX chromosomes.
Yes, depending on the profession, there are definitely jobs in America where being exposed as a "transphobe" (not posting hateful things on Twitter, but just saying trans women are men) can get you fired. Not everywhere; most workplaces just expect you to be polite to your coworkers and don't want to deal with disputes over what someone believes in their personal life. But any job that has public exposure and leftist stakeholders can be perilous to be "out" with heterodox views.
I... really do not think that is true. I mean, wokes might claim that a hairy bearded trans woman is a woman, and therefore if you are a male in a relationship with said trans woman, that is a heterosexual relationship. But realistically I think even wokes would be surprised to meet a 100% straight man going for that. Of course I think that that's because even wokes, deep down, know that said hairy bearded trans woman is in fact a man.
As for the trans criticals, if a straight man were into Buck Angel, I think they are perfectly capable of admitting that Buck Angel looks like a man and if you are a man who finds Buck Angel hot you are probably not all that straight. But that still wouldn't make Buck Angel a man.
Well, happy that we can at least agree on that :p
But I’ve seen enough examples of non passing, pre-T trans guys insisting that their boyfriend is gay for being with them and I think they’re being genuine. Likewise in reverse with gender-criticals.
Not according to your definition sure, but I think it’s quite useful to separate “male” from “man” (or “dude” or “guy”). A trans man is female, but can be a man, a boyfriend, a husband, referred to as “that dude over there”, because those aren’t scientific terms or claims about their chromosomes. Otherwise it’s kinda like insisting you’ll never see your friends’ adoptive parents as their mum and dad no matter the circumstances, because mother and father should be used purely for the biological parents. It just turns into a semantic debate, and debating whether a trans guy is a man becomes as stupid as arguing whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is around. What are we actually debating here?
You have seen gender-criticals claiming a non-passing trans guy in a relationship with a man is in... a straight relationship? That would be consistent! (I think the trans guy claiming her boyfriend is totally gay is coping, because she'd be mad to realize he still thinks of her as a woman.) Or do you mean something else? I'm honestly confused here.
This is the whole "sex versus gender" debate. Provisionally, I am willing to accept that gender roles are more fluid than gametes, but I also think gender roles are social/psychological constructs (i.e., basically I agree with the gender-criticals here). If you are a man but you "feel" like a woman and act like a woman and want to be seen as a woman, fine, whatever, but it doesn't make you female. In an ideal world, this wouldn't matter and we wouldn't have to debate it. Doctors could factor in your natal sex when it matters and otherwise it would be mostly irrelevant. Just as being an adopted child does not make you less of a real child, but if you start being concerned with genetic diseases you kind of need to know someone's biological parentage.
At its heart, we're debating whether gender "exists" in some real fashion, outside your head or mine, as something separate from sex.
The reason we care about the debate are all the effects it has that makes people mad. You have your religious conservatives who think living as a different sex is violating God's law. They can pound sand as far as I'm concerned, but they exist. You have the fragile trans-identified people who think it's a violation of their personhood not to really, truly see them and internalize your conception of them as whatever sex they say they are. They can also pound sand. Both those camps would be fine if they just MYOB and let people think what they wish as long as their rights aren't being infringed upon.
But then you have the men who want to enter women's space (almost never the reverse) and that's where all the heat is, even if it's a relative small frequency compared to the total trans population. But if you think women's sports matter, it's important! If you think women being raped in prison is important, it matters! If you think bad faith actors using trans ideology to act out their fetishes and subject other people to them under the cover of identity politics is an issue, it matters!
You seem pretty reasonable: you are not bothered by my thinking of you as a man as long as I'm not rude to you. But that hasn't been my experience with most trans people. They don't want you to just mouth the words. They want you to really believe, or at least pretend to believe so convincingly that you'd suck girldick and call yourself straight if it came to that. We're debating whether it's possible to accommodate such people while also letting you live your life as a woman.
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I think the category you're basically talking about is "social justice inquisitors". This is a real category, and it is not unreasonable to be angry that hostile inquisitors exist and one must (in many areas of life) hide from them to avoid massive retaliation. But not all social justice inquisitors are trans (indeed, my understanding is that most aren't), and not all transfolk are social justice inquisitors - the correlation's positive and even large, but it's not 1.
Okay, and? I didn't say that all SJ inquisitors are trans or that all trans are SJ inquisitors. But yes, the correlation is significant enough that if I am dealing with trans people, I have to expect a high probability of dealing with someone who's looking to collect SJ scalps.
*scratches head*
This is what pegged my Wrong on the Internet instincts, because the people I've met on the "Tag" end of things haven't been trans.
Yes, obviously other people on other topics collect SJ scalps, but I don't have to deal with SJs of other flavors generally. Or if I do, it's not somewhere where they have social or institutional power over dissenters.
You don't even run into non-trans SJ busybodies about the trans issue? "Allies"?
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