This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I will quote myself:
What constitutes a sensible course of action varies depending on a society's current tech level. You are correct that we can treat medical conditions now that we once could not. But don't you agree it would be phenomenally irresponsible to go back in time before the invention of the telegraph and urge a small child to play with a dog that was visibly foaming at the mouth?
If and when it becomes possible to transplant ovaries and uteri from female donors into male recipients such that trans-identified males can actually get pregnant and bear children, that technological development will surely have dramatic ramifications for our society. But that day hasn't arrived yet, it seems profoundly unlikely to arrive in either of our lifetimes, and I can't rule out the possibility that it never will.
I think it makes sense to promote policies that will produce the best outcomes for our current tech level, not the hypothetical future tech level a few decades away. If you went back in time to the pre-telegraph era, urged a small child to play with a visibly rabid dog, and the child contracted rabies and died – I can't imagine the child's parents would be mollified by your assertion that a reliable treatment for rabies was just around the corner, even if that's true. By the same token, perhaps in the future medical technology will advance to the point that people born male can literally become female (and vice versa) – but they can't now, and it's foolish to act as if they can and design policies on that basis.
You're the one who brought up gamete-producing organs. If you asked someone at any time prior to the invention of the microscope what the biological definition of 'male' and 'female' are, they would point to the configuration of the parts between the legs. I can think of no reason for preferring your definition over the classical one as the One True Criterion Of Biological Sex that would apply in any society in which either both or neither were changeable; thus I can only come to one of two conclusions:
You started with the assumption that biological sex is both unchangeable and single-variable, chose 'gamete-producing organs' as your dividing line because we do not yet know how to fully transition them, and, having chosen that as the definition of biological sex, used it to support your claim that biological sex is unchangeable.
You have some valid reason, which would have applied even prior to the development of what, even thirty years ago, was called a 'sex-change operation', for favouring one definition over another, but that reason is entirely beyond what I can derive from the extent of my knowledge.
I am not assuming that (1.) is the case, but if it is (2.), can you spell out your reasoning for defining sex on the basis of gamete-producing organs?
I wouldn't think that advisable even now. I just don't think letting trans-women use the ladies' room is equivalent to that.
Given how much you appear to admire Eliezer, and how much stock you put in the Sequences, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Eliezer wrote an entire article arguing that the desire to "change one's sex" is a fundamentally incoherent one.
Well, I just happen to disagree with him on that particular point. (Is it not written, only half facetiously, that a rationalist is someone who publicly disagrees with Eliezer Yudkowsky?)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Wrong. You seem to have this idea that I'm carving up categories in a convoluted and unintuitive fashion with the specific aim of disenfranchising and ostracizing trans people. That is, you think I'm the mirror image of trans people, who start with the end goal of including males in the category of "women" and work backwards to produce a definition that satisfies that goal, even if it's a contrived one that doesn't match common usage. (Given you're so fond of quoting the Sequences, I'll note that Eliezer points out you can never come up with a truly rational answer if you already know what the answer is "supposed" to be at the beginning of your chain of "reasoning".)
Rather, my gamete-based definition of sex is the one used by biologists and zoologists when examining every sexually reproductive species other than humans: no one thinks that a female giraffe is "any giraffe who identifies as female" or some such nonsense. (See Dawkins and Wright for more information.) Humans are mammals, and I have yet to see a persuasive argument why our sexual categories should not be defined in the same way as those of all other mammals are. ("Because it makes some people sad" is not a persuasive argument, even if Scott seems to think so.)
The gamete-based definition of sex is the one that biologists and zoologists use. According to that definition, no trans-identified male is female, nor will become so in either of our lifetimes. In the event that we reach the tech level that enables us to do this, we may have to revise our categories such that people born male but now capable of producing large gametes are considered literally female. But we will cross that bridge when we come to it, and given the current state of the art it doesn't strike me as an especially pressing issue. To the best of my knowledge, no one has even attempted to transplant a uterus, ovaries etc. into a male human recipient, never mind done so successfully such that the male recipient actually can menstruate, become pregnant etc.
Is your contention that the entire medical community made the wrong call when they started referring to these procedures as "gender reassignment" or "gender-affirming" surgeries?
"People in the past used to call things by misleading or inaccurate names – therefore we should continue doing so today". By this "logic", we ought to refer to Native Americans as "Indians", people with Down's syndrome as "mongoloids", Inuits as "Eskimos", rubella as "German measles" and so on. I find it very strange how you freely recognise that people in the past were more ignorant than we are now, but only selectively. I mean, seriously: "the first name applied to something always captures the true Platonic essence of that thing and is never inaccurate or misleading in any way" is one hell of a hot take. Has it never occurred to you that people can be mistaken? Even doctors and surgeons? History is littered with examples of trained medical professionals being mistaken about matters of far graver import than simple naming conventions.
If I'm reading you correctly, you seem to believe that every male who undergoes bottom surgery literally becomes female. I will emphasise that, even if we insist on defining sex according to what's in between your legs, emasculated males are not female. The absence of a penis is not the same thing as the presence of a vagina. Per your genital-based definition of sex, it is currently possible to change one's sex, but only to change it from "male" to "neuter". If you want to say that emasculated men are neither male nor female – well, I still think it's a rather convoluted way of looking at it, but I would object to it less than the claim that emasculated males are literally female.
And here's the part where you tell me that trans-identified males haven't just emasculated themselves, but also undergone bottom surgery which bestowed vaginas upon them. Sorry, not having it. A neovagina is a crude imitation of a vagina, not the genuine article. Everyone with a neovagina will need to dilate it for several hours a day to prevent it from closing up, as the open wound that it is. (A very small number of female people need to temporarily dilate their vaginas to treat stenosis; if there's an example in the medical literature of a woman who failed to dilate her vagina and it literally closed up, I would love to see it.) A trans-identified male whose neovagina was bleeding for five consecutive days would be strongly advised to seek medical attention: for a female person, this is called "menstruation". When a symptom of grave illness for one organ looks exactly like normal bodily function for another organ, I think it's fair to say the two organs should not be placed in the same category.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link