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I said two months ago I would reply to a comment about this study on the mental health effects of gender transition. I have only now managed to find the time, so I'm going to post my reply as a top-level comment lest it get buried. You can find the previous discussion here.
To be honest, some of the statistical manipulation seems dubious, but that's above my pay grade, so I'm going to assume the study was conducted in good faith with no shenanigans.
In short, the study finds that, contrary to assumptions that transitioning should improve mental health, the share of people needing mental health treatment rises drastically after transition. Anti-trans people conclude that this means transition actually worsens mental health, and, hence, people should not be allowed to transition.
There's some nitpicking to be done here, for example, maybe the patients already needed mental health treatment and just found out they needed it at the same time as they found out they're transgender, or that just seeing a mental health professional regularly doesn't necessarily mean that your mental health is worse than it used to be.
But my fundamental objection is to the conclusion that no one should be allowed to transition. Suppose the anti-trans side is completely correct on the facts, that transitioning did, in fact, directly worsen the mental health of many or even most patients. There are still some patients who are better off. There are countless anecdotal reports online of people who are happier after transitioning. The most you can conclude is that the criteria for who should transition need to be changed. (If I'm interpreting the data right, the likelihood of needing mental health treatment after transitioning was higher in those born later, consistent with the rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)/social contagion hypothesis.) But if you care about people's happiness, some people should still be supported in transitioning.
Obviously if you believe all trans people are delusional and object to transition and treating people as their stated gender regardless of the effect on their mental health, this does not apply to you. But in that case the study isn't an argument you can use.
Speaking of ROGD, its rhetorical use by anti-trans people is a peculiar example of a self-contradictory motte-and-bailey: usually the bailey is a stronger version of the motte, and thus necessarily consistent with it, but here the bailey ("all trans people are delusional and none of them are their stated gender") contradicts the motte ("some trans people with a specific presentation – primarily adolescent girls – are not actually their stated gender") because the latter presupposes that some trans people are, in fact, their stated gender. If you believe all trans people are delusional, why do you care about the specific etiology of the transness of a specific subgroup of trans people? The treatment, whichever you prefer, should be the same.
I consider myself pro-trans, but I believe ROGD/social contagion may well be a real thing. If you agree about the possibility of social contagion, you should try to minimize the attention trans people receive, yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now – trans people really entered the mainstream with the North Carolina "bathroom bill". It used to be that you would only find information about transness if you went looking for it because you were questioning your gender, but now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists), you get impressionable young people who were not predisposed to questioning their gender hearing about it and joining in for the standard reasons impressionable young people join trends. (Cf. media coverage of school shootings encouraging more school shootings – a common argument among anti-gun-control people.)
I highly doubt you're arguing in good faith here.
Not sure who you're talking to, but that isn't the modal "anti-trans" view, and I doubt anyone has that strawman view on this forum. Sure, many trans people are delusional (the ones who merely declare they want to be treated as the other sex aren't, but the modern line that they are and always have been another sex is just obviously false). But adults are free to pursue happiness in their own way, including transitioning, and it's no big deal for me to be polite and play along with their preferences most of the time.
I suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:
This is a hilariously absurd take. You're just shit-stirring.
Where does that happen? Let's look at Wikipedia specifically. The articles for Caitlyn Jenner and Elliot Page have their former names right there in the first sentence. I think a lower-profile trans person who wasn't notable before transitioning might have their name excluded, maybe because there are no reliable sources available stating their former name, maybe as a courtesy, since it is of no interest to the public anyway. The same courtesy was unfortunately not extended to Scott Alexander, but it is extended to, for example, the streamer Jerma985 whose real name you won't find anywhere in his article. It formerly contained a fake real name, which he presents as his real name, presumably to protect his privacy, but even that has now been removed.
Has anyone ever lost their job because they didn't use the right pronouns? If they did this consistently, especially if they did it to customers, it could be seen as disrespectful, akin to calling their coworkers or customers names, which is a valid reason to lose a job.
Has anyone ever gone to jail because of pronouns? As far as I can tell, that is just a fantasy of Jordan Peterson's.
Has that ever happened?
If you look carefully, you'll notice that all they've done is change the terms to "AMAB" and "AFAB", respectively. Having these categories is, in fact, necessary, and even trans activists can't get away from them. All they can do is be politically correct.
If that's your concern, talk about that instead of claiming that all trans people are perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc., and none of them should be treated as their preferred gender. FWIW, I agree these concerns are valid.
So, I hate to do this because (unlike @rae) I just think you're just being disingenuous, but this should be a place where people admit fault. This is a simple, verifiable fact, and you're right and I was wrong. I overreached when talking about "deadnaming". The leftist spaces I'm in still treat it as akin to putting people in ovens, but it looks like Wikipedia does actually acknowledge that a person called Ellen Page existed once. It's very very VERY grudging - if you visit the pages for any movies Ellen Page was in, her credit is buried at the literal bottom of each one in a tiny note. (It's almost comedic, frankly.) For Juno, her breakout film, the note literally just reads "credited as Ellen Page", as if the producers typoed her name. But the text does exist. And describing reality, however shoddily and unwillingly, is still better than I gave them credit for. Mea culpa.
Where the hell did THAT come from?
Mainstream anti-trans rhetoric. Not you specifically.
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At least one British man was convicted for misgendering, although his conviction was overturned on appeal. Something similar happened to a British woman, who was convicted for calling a trans-identified male a man, a conviction that was likewise overturned.
To the best of my knowledge no one has actually been sent to prison for misgendering, but at least two people have been arrested and held in jail cells for misgendering.
Which amounts to destruction. No one's sex is "assigned" at birth, like you just arbitrarily bestowed a sex on them but another one would have done just as well. Sexes are observed at birth. The claim that a doctor simply "assigns" them on a whim does, in fact, amount to a fundamental demolition of what the word "sex" means. Which would be bad enough if that was all trans activists were doing, which it isn't. See the absurd attempts to portray sex as a "spectrum", the inability of medical doctors to give a straight answer to simple questions like "can men get pregnant?", the replacement of commonly used anatomical terms with ghastly, dehumanising substitutes like "front hole", "chestfeeding", "birthing person" and "menstruators"...
It would be bad enough if "all" trans activists had done/wanted to do was replace the words "male" and "female" with "AMAB" and "AFAB" respectively. But it's abundantly obvious that that is not all they have done or want to do. Frankly, it strains credibility that you are so ignorant of the specifics of this group you're so routinely going to bat for.
Both cases are from several years ago and, as you said, both were overturned, so no further prosecution will be brought for similar cases. Note that overzealous prosecution for tweets under the Communications Act 2003 that later gets overturned is nothing new and doesn't even have to involve culture war topics.
Everyone knows that "AFAB" is just a euphemism for "born female". Do you campaign against euphemisms in general or is it this one specific pair of euphemisms that you consider the great political issue of our time? I myself think euphemisms are stupid and would prefer just "female at birth", but I recognize that they're harmless in the grand scheme of things.
The case of Imane Khelif is instructive. We have people here claiming she is a man. Yet she has a vagina and from birth she was assumed to be female. Would you not agree that, in her case, "assigned" rather than "observed" is the correct term to use?
"Front hole" and "chestfeeding" are terms trans people use for themselves and are not meant to replace terms used for cis women. "Birthing person" and "menstruator" are medical terms, not intended for general use or to replace any existing terms, created to be very specific. They are similar to the term "men who have sex with men" ("MSM"), widely used in medicine because it describes exactly what is meant and avoids unnecessary controversy over whether they are gay or bi or whatever else. No one identifies as a "man who has sex with men" and the term is not meant to be used outside medicine.
I really hate this specific breed of whataboutism that so many trans activists practise, when literally any criticism of any component of the trans activist agenda is met with derisive accusations that their interlocutor thinks this issue is the most important issue facing the entire planet!!!!1!
Where, exactly, did I say that the demand that the words "male" and "female" be substituted with "AMAB" and "AFAB" is "the great political issue of our time"? Why do you insist on repeatedly putting words in my mouth and attributing things to me I never said, beliefs I never endorsed?
"People here" including Khelif themself.
Yes, "assigned" is the appropriate phrasing to use in the specific case of people with disorders of sexual development. Trans activists, however, want to use the "assigned at birth" phrasing for everyone, including the 99% of people who were born without DSDs. I was not "assigned" the male sex at birth: the doctor who delivered me correctly identified my sex as male.
"Destruction" and "demolition" are very strong words.
She says she has an SRY gene. She doesn't say she is a man. You may consider the two equivalent, but evidently she does not, so no, she didn't say she is a man.
True, but my asserting that trans activists are trying to destroy or demolish the meaning of the word "sex" doesn't imply that this is the most important issue in the world, any more than "a construction company demolished a building in my neighbourhood" implies that there's anything especially important about said building.
Clearly you care about the words' meanings, and I would say that the use of such strong words does imply that you care a lot. Accusing your political opponents of "destroying" or "demolishing" anything is clearly very charged and implies that you think the destruction is a very bad thing. It is totally unlike using the word "demolish" in its neutral, literal meaning.
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My stance is more or less what you describe, but I was under the impression that that makes me an outlier on this forum (especially if weighted by posting activity). The majority of active posters now seem to be sexual traditionalists with enough of an authoritarian streak that they subscribe to argumentation to the effect of (1) society is rotten, (2) the existence of sexual deviants contributes to its rottenness, (3) therefore we need to crack down on sexual deviation, over any ideas that adults are free to pursue happiness in their own way.
There's a reason for that, once succinctly (if rudely) expressed by Winston Churchill -- "The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet". Live and let live, in general and with trans stuff in particular, has simply not worked -- every bit of tolerance has been used as a wedge to demand something more.
These "we have to do the bad thing to them or else they will do the bad thing to us" statements are facile. Churchill's "Hun", you must realise, is Germany, which is currently not at Britain's feet. Did the British make a mistake in acquiescing to the post-WWII European security architecture?
I'm not sure what the equivalent of utterly defeating Germany, tearing it in half, having different coalitions occupy the two halves, one for almost half a century, and only then finally letting off while still having both Germany and the UK arguably at the feet of the US would be for trans activists, but I'm sure it hasn't happened.
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Undeniably
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Then why did they, in fact, immediately do bad things to us right after pressure on them was relieved, when they loudly and repeatedly promised that all they want is tolerance?
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Look at Britain post-WW2. Look at Britain now.
I’d say that’s a yes. We should have done what the French did and told everybody else to shove it and built our own security architecture.
Do you think British decline would actually have been forestalled if they had focussed their energies on continuing to forestall the Germans? I guess that if you believe things now are worse most everywhere, it's easy to point at past choices to deescalate and imagine the counterfactual would have turned out better. (But, should Japan and Korea have stayed at each other's throats? The US and Canada? Sweden and Denmark?)
The French surely had their own version of that meme, considering their rivalry with the Germans went back further and they were the ones to push the most for the punitive terms of Versailles.
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It applies to me. All transgenders are wrong about a very obvious and easily verifiable fact. That is, literally, the definition of transgender. They confront proof of this wrongness every time they take a shower or use the toilet- hopefully, multiple times a day. They are, in other words, delusional, and playing along for the sake of their mental health is not actually any sort of obligation, except perhaps occasionally for actual mental health professionals, and not for the sake of increasing their comfort with their delusion but only for that of getting at and treating the underlying issues.
Now there are many lumped into the category of transgender who believe themselves to be something other than male and female, who identify as 'queer' or 'nonbinary'. I don't know what these categories are because these categories are not real, and while these people are wrong they're wrong about metaphysics- claiming to be something that isn't real on nonexistent philosophical grounds isn't falsifiable, it can't be delusional. But these people are not transgenders proper.
This stance does not, incidentally, actually determine whether people should be banned from transition. Not least, transition is sufficiently difficult to define as to make that hard.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but OP was addressing imaginary people who say "no one should be allowed to transition". It doesn't sound like you fit that mould. Of course, the pro-trans media will throw people who don't want kids to transition, or who don't want to be forced to pay for others transitioning, into that category. But that's politics for you; and you shouldn't do their work for them by self-identifying as such.
FWIW I don't think anyone should be allowed to transition in the same sense I believe nobody should be allowed to get an amputation of a healthy functional limb. There is a basic principle that physicians shouldn't facilitate self-harm by mentally ill people. Physicians are licensed and regulated by the State and it's reasonable (in my opinion) for the state to impose restrictions on the kinds of medical procedures physicians can do. Ideally this should be province of state medical boards and state medical associations, but there is a big enough problem of ideological capture by insane Leftism that it's appropriate for the legislature to step in.
That being said, the transitioning of minors is a far more outrageous and compelling issue than the general question of sex-change procedures. What's almost as outrageous (and compelling) is social and legal compulsion of people to play along with trans ideology. If the trans crowd would agree to (1) stop trying to trans people who are underage; and (2) stop forcing people to use the word "ma'am" with someone who is obviously a dude in a dress (and this includes coercing institutions into letting obvious men use the ladies' locker room), I personally would concede on letting consenting adults going through sex-change operations.
Realistically, though, this is always going to be a subjective judgement call. If you go to the extremes on this, then tattoos or even ear piercing should be illegal! Cutting off an arm is clearly a much worse (and more irreversible) level of harm than surgery on your genitals. Yes, the latter squicks me out, but given my libertarian leanings, I want the government to have a really compelling, almost-universally-accepted reason to outright ban something. Which amputation satisfies, but transition surgery does not.
The government could easily ban "social transitioning" where by a random school teacher and her danger hair friends in the school admin decide to treat your child as a different gender then conspire on the backend to keep you ignorant. I think that's where the current wokes in the trans movement really shot themselves in the foot.
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While the former would have a much greater impact on your day-to-day activities, never being able to have children seems like a really big imposition. It would be interesting to do a poll asking people if they'd rather lose an arm or all functioning in their genitalia.
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I don’t understand what’s the delusion? The vast majority of trans people are acutely aware of the reality of their biological sex, otherwise they would not be taking hormones and having surgery.
Being trans is about wanting to be the opposite sex, or at least being distressed by your own biological sex and sexual characteristics. What are they wrong about?
It’s like thinking overweight people who take GLP-1 antagonists are delusional about thinking they’re actually skinny. That seems… completely backwards? There’s anorexic people who take Ozempic but the delusion is thinking they’re being fat - the equivalent would be a cis woman taking estrogen because she has a delusion that she’s biologically male. A trans woman is 100% correct about not being biologically female, which is why she’d want medical interventions instead of doing nothing!
There’s an ontological debate over the definition of the words “woman” and “man” and the whole gender vs sex kerfuffle, and some activists’ definition of “woman” is circular to the point of uselessness, but that’s a separate issue and more of a debate around values, not facts.
The delusion is thinking that the hormones and whatever else actually make you a man/woman, rather than the opposite in a costume. It no more entitles he to she transgenders to use the women’s room than a naughty nun costume for a Halloween party does. People on ozempic are actually literally skinny, they can verify this with a scale. People on hormones are actually literally not the other sex.
Now like I said, this doesn’t have anything in particular to do with whether transition should be allowed. I would lean towards ‘no’, but that’s a separate point having to do with attitudes towards gender roles. It’s not some axiomatic conclusion from the point being made.
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Delusions such as "Now that I take artificially produced female hormones, I totally have changed my biological sex I am now indeed a biological woman just like other women". Delusions such as "One of the side-effects of taking hormones is abdominal cramping and pains. This is precisely the same thing as female periods, I am a real woman having real periods just like other women".
Ah, the happy days of "gender is not the same as sex and none of us are claiming that", how I look back wistfully upon them.
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I know, I know, nutpicking and all that, but I've encountered more than my fair share of trans-identified males who will complain about being described as "male" and who insist that they're every bit as female as any cis woman. I have no idea how common such people are, but they absolutely exist.
Regardless of how many people actually believe this, it's obvious that politically this is the line mainstream trans activism has to take, because otherwise to exclude trans people from spaces, all their opponents have to do is relabel them from, say, "women's sports" to "female sports", and that would defeat the entire purpose of trans activism.
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The delusion is in insisting that wanting to be something is exactly the same thing as being that something, which is obviously ridiculous. Honestly you are starting to sound wilfully ignorant which makes me think you are trans-identified yourself, because consistently denying reality and pretending not to understand things that have been explained to you ad nauseam is a key characteristic of trans-identified people and their allies.
But I'll bite and explain once more. According to mainstream gender ideology:
To apply this analogy, it would be like thinking that overweight people become skinny merely by expressing the desire to become skinny. And moreover, not only are they now skinny (even though they are objectively still fat), they have retroactively always been skinny, and if you deny this, you are a bigot and you will get banned for misweighting a stunning and brave transskinny person.
The fact that nobody actually thinks like this when it comes to fat people shows how ridiculous gender ideology is.
And sure, there is a type of trans person who actually tries to transition. They will take cross sex hormones, change out their wardrobe, change their behavior, and so on. Those people have at least some valid claim to be treated as the opposite sex. But importantly, gender ideology doesn't require anyone to do anything like that (claiming someone needs to transitions to be “valid” as a transgender makes you truscum which is practically as bad as being a TERF) and even if you go through all that trouble, obviously it doesn't change who you were before your transition, although gender ideologues will insist that who you were in the past depends entirely on what you identify as today.
@rae is trans, yes.
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My understanding of the matter is more:
The premise that gender is merely a separate thing from sex was used as a foot in the door twenty years ago. No modern gender ideologue operates on the basis that biological sex is real and important today.
If you disagree, I will ask you the same thing as I asked Rae: go ahead edit the fact that Imane Khelif is male and that Elliot Page is female into their respective Wikipedia pages. If you manage to do that, I will concede that gender ideologues in the real world separate sex from gender identity.
Sure, that's what gender ideologues believe, but why shouldn't it be? Especially if they use their false claim to get special privileges, like Imane Khelif falsely claiming to be a woman to compete in the women's boxing tournament.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.
The closest case I can think of is someone like Oscar Pistorius who is a sprinter with artifical legs who was eventually banned from competing against natural humans because he had an advantage over regular athletes. If we can ban Pistorius from men's sports, why can't we ban Khelif from women's sports?
Imane Khelif isn't even trans! By all accounts, she has a vagina and was raised as a girl, and she and her entire family have believed she is female her whole life. Even if she does have XY chromosomes (not confirmed), a hundred years ago we wouldn't have even known that and no one would have questioned her womanhood.
Whether Khelif is trans or has a vagina really depends on which definition you use, but let's talk about something more interesting:
I'm willing to believe that Khelif and her family assumed her female until puberty, but after that, they must have noticed something was up.
I find it hard to believe that even in a relatively poor country like Algeria, a teenage girl can go through puberty without ever menstruating or developing secondary sexual characteristics like breasts and hips, and nobody questions it or takes her to the doctor. Algeria is a poor country, but they're not that primitive. And even primitive peoples understand the basics of male and female anatomy pretty well.
And then of course there were all the failed sex tests: first by the IBA, and then by a private doctor in France in 2023, which Khelif later admitted confirmed he has male genetics and male typical testosterone levels.
Note that his was before the 2024 Olympics, when it became known that he had failed the IBA tests, but the results of his private tests weren't public knowledge yet. The IOC and various useful idiots spread the lie that the IBA results had been falsified by evil Russians. Khelif knew this wasn't true, because his own private results confirmed the IBA tests, but he never spoke up. This seems calculated.
Then later, in 2025, Khelif tried to participate in the boxing championship held in the UK, organized by World Boxing, the Western organization that was created to replace the IBA. They also required a sex test, which Khelif refused to take, despite being desparate to compete (he even sued the organization to force admission without doing the test, but lost). Why would a person who legitimately believes himself to be female refuse to take a sex test designed to confirm that fact?
So it's clear at this point Khelif knows he's genetically male, and that therefore he will never pass any test designed to screen out genetic males. He probably knew this at the 2024 Olympics, too, because he had already failed the IBA tests and had them confirmed by his own doctor. He was intentionally witholding that information.
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Photos from the Olympics clearly show Khelif being carried on their coach's shoulders and their coach's hands touching Khelif's bare skin. In theocratic MENA countries it's a big no-no for a man to touch the bare skin of a woman who isn't his wife (many women won't even shake hands with a man when meeting him). The coach definitely knew.
Strange, given Khelif has admitted it.
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Sure, I'll happily keep my mouth shut about that should I ever encounter an obviously trans person in real life (by the way, that's another claim I've seen: 'you do know trans people, hundreds of them, you've met them, they're all around you'. Er, no.)
But when someone starts in about "how about we all share our pronouns?" or the likes and makes it about "let's not embarrass trans people by relying on visual identification where they don't pass, let's all share our pronouns so we're not outing anyone, even though we are in fact outing people" (and I'll admit that's often or mostly the allies, or some other branch of the LGBT+++ movement, not the trans people themselves doing it), then they make it about "I am clearly pretending to be something I'm not and demanding you openly accede to that verbally". If you're going to demand I say out loud "yes, Sally is a girl" then I reserve the right to say out loud "We all know Sally used to be John". I'm willing to exchange courtesy for courtesy and live-and-let-live, but not if I'm asked (or strongly encouraged) to participate in the pretence.
I did see an example in my own work life of someone firing off emails with their pronouns in the signature line, I don't know if this was something mandated by where they worked (because it was a couple of different people in the same organisation doing it) but thankfully that seems to have died a natural death. If you can't tell by my obviously female name what gender I present as, and we're never going to meet face-to-face, and you don't need to know my gender/sex/number of limbs, then why make a big deal out of it? I did not need to know that Susie was going by "she/her" in order to send back the completed form as requested per your last.
My mum argued that pronouns can be helpful, not for the purposes of trans inclusivity, but because sometimes she gets emails from people from foreign countries and isn't sure if their forename is a boy's or girl's name.
I pointed out that we used to have a perfectly effective means of solving this problem: Mr./Mrs./Ms. This seems like a great example of jugaad ethics.
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Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".
I agree. Part of the problem with the skin condition analogy is that the issue doesn't normally come up in ordinary life. The way you address a person isn't normally based on whether the person has clear skin. By contrast, you normally call a person "sir" or "ma'am" based on whether they are male or female. Similarly, people don't use a particular locker room based on whether or not they have a skin condition.
I think A better analogy would be if people with serious skin conditions were given access to special resources, for example more convenient parking spaces during the summer months so that they wouldn't have to spend as much time walking outdoors. And if a person with perfectly healthy skin was permitted to identify as having a skin condition and take advantage of this special access. And if anyone who complained about the situation (or who didn't go along with pretending that the person had a skin condition) were ostracized.
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That’s my understanding as well. Maybe @MartianNight and @hydroacetylene don’t believe in the gender/sex distinction but it’s central to the mainstream trans viewpoint and it’s either a straw man or a misinterpretation to interpret “x was always a man” as “x is and always was biologically male”.
Progressives will be very sensitive about language and avoid explicitly calling a trans man a biological female, but they aren’t (completely) denying reality, they’ll just use euphemisms and softer language (like AFAB/AMAB, “presenting as female at the time”). If you don’t have hold the sex/gender distinction it’s easy to think it’s complete nonsensical absurdity and that they’re saying a man can will himself into having a uterus, as opposed to having this nebulously defined conception of the inner self as a woman.
There is no gender/sex distinction. Famously, Matt Walsh asked “what is a woman?”. Self ID doesn’t get you there because unless you have a platonic form there is no way one can in fact identify as a woman (what is someone identifying with if there is no form). So the only possible coherence is to look at the platonic form of a female and see if women maps onto it.
But then trans folks are basically claiming that doing certain activities are the defining form of being a woman (again if there is any coherence to trans ideology — one could say there are many ways to be a woman but trans people need there to be a platonic form). And by doing so, by saying “women are X, Y, and Z” trans folks are basically telling a bunch of females that they actually aren’t a woman (unlike the trans “woman” who is male). That is patently ridiculous. No, the woman who was born with women’s characteristics shouldn’t be told she isnt a woman by a confused man. Being a woman (based on sex) is easily defined and generally has worked for society for ages; yes there are extreme edge cases but far fewer than if the trans incoherence was adopted.
So even if you take the weak form of trans claims, they still fall apart into incoherent delusions since the only way to make any sense of gender is by tying it in to sex and therefore breaking the alleged binary.
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No it's not, and I've already pointed you to enough examples that I now believe you are being completely disingenuous the way all gender ideologues are always completely disingenuous.
If gender ideologues embraced the sex/gender distinction, Wikipedia's Elliot Page article would start with: "Elliot Page is a female actor who identifies as a man"
And Wikipedia's Imane Khelif article would start with "Imane Khelif is an intersex male suffering from 5AR2D who identifies as a woman..."
The Khelif article literally contains the false claim that "Khelif was born female" and for months contained the completely unsubstantiated sentence "false claims that she was a male circulated online": while these claims did circulate online, they were factually true, and this is still not acknowledged, though the sentence has been modified by replacing "male" with "man" which is still a lie since Khelif is a man in the trivial meaning of the word.
There is no "sensitivity" or "soft language" here. There is just a complete denial of objective reality. And it's not an oversight: this was one of the most-viewed articles of 2025. Many people tried to correct the "born female" and "false claims" phrasing; these people were all overruled by the gender activists that watch these articles like hawks and police the language carefully with the intent to maximally deceive the public.
If you disagree and you think the statement "Khelif was born female" was not meant to deceive the reader into thinking Khelif was born female (when in fact Khelif was born male) I would love to read your argument to that effect. But stop your bullshit about me not “believing” in a gender/sex distinction that obviously real world gender ideologues don't believe in either, considering that they're always intentionally conflating gender with sex, and never plainly state the sex of transgender/intersex people.
Intersex is a whole other kettle of fish, and I have sympathy there. But it's been hijacked as the "hit me now with the child in my arms" by the trans activists in order to go "well ackshully chromosomes aren't enough or assignment at birth isn't enough because what about this case and this case and this case of intersex people? checkmate, bigot!"
Someone with Klinefelter Syndrome is not the same as someone with functional sexual characteristics and two X chromosomes now declaring that they are the same as XY male for all intents and purposes. So what if I'm getting pregnant, I am the father of this child not the mother!
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How have I denied reality? I guess we can argue over the proportions of people with extreme beliefs about gender. I’m not even saying I agree with the mainstream pro trans position, I don’t, but I feel like you’re painting a straw man here.
Anyone who believes trans people literally become the opposite sex by self declaration is delusional and an idiot. That might be a big proportion of people arguing online about it, I don’t know, but I’ve thankfully never met anyone who believed that IRL.
That is so stupid it has so be a straw man or a minority of hardcore activists that don’t represent most trans people (which I have never encountered). Trans activists are all about separating gender from sex, and saying you being a man or a woman is different from you being male or female. That’s why there’s the whole “what is a woman” debate, otherwise how would that work, would they believe you can spontaneously manifest a uterus by believing you have one?
This is the vast majority of trans people I know, at least for hormones and wardrobe, behaviour is somewhat hit or miss.
Guess I’m as bad as a TERF then. If you make no attempt to present as a woman before going to the woman’s bathroom or locker room, obviously you might make people uncomfortable and they wouldn’t be out of bounds in asking you to leave.
I know that this feels like we're all piling on to you, but there are enough crazy people out there pushing extreme edges that most of us are frustrated. If it were just crazy people on social media declaring that they are trans masc non-binary female presenting two-spirit third gender folx, we'd roll our eyes and move on. But the craziness has real world consequences, from prisons to sports to encounters in everyday life.
This entire topic has become way too heated; first it was "trust the science, bigot" but now the science is inconvenient so that becomes "oh well they're all TERFs and no, that thing that happened never happened!"
I don’t even agree with mainstream transgender philosophy, I don’t believe in “gender” in the classic sex/gender dichotomy (it’s far too influenced by biological factors in my view). But everybody here is jumping to the least charitable interpretation of “gender ideology” and assuming I share those beliefs. You can’t call all trans people delusional, then when I ask what delusions I have, start bringing up straw men or viewpoints I don’t even have and have repudiated many times.
The same way the trans masc non-binary female presenting two-spirit third gender folx pushed people to the right, the “all trans people are delusional, trans healthcare should be banned, there should be laws and fines for going to the wrong bathroom” takes are gonna push people to the left. I feel like there’s already a vibe shift where the people are nostalgic for woke and seeing it as having been mostly silly and not that big of a deal. The they/thems didn’t start a war in the Middle East at least.
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What we're all is trying to drill into you is that the absurd things we describe are not strawmen. They are official policy and actual law in many places.
Yes! This makes you as bad as a TERF! Your common sense here is - and I want to emphasize that this is not hyperbole or exaggeration - against the law in California. You cannot ask a man not to use the women's shower, as this constitutes discrimination against their self-declared gender. The relevant law is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which includes "gender identity and gender expression" as protected categories.
Here is one attempt to fix this with legislation. The site Trans Legislation Tracker declares that this is an anti-trans bill. Their own hostile summary includes this: "The Legislature finds and declares [...] Gender identity is fluid, and there is no ability for a commercial enterprise to determine if an individual's claim of a gender identity is sincere or is a pretext to obtain access to the opposite sex's intimate spaces." Which is absolutely correct! Just the acknowledgement that bad actors exist is treated as anti-trans!
You need to get your head out of the sand. Trans-aligned politics is absolutely bonkers. The vast majority of us allegedly "anti-trans" folks aren't being bigots; we're just trying to restore a measure of normalcy.
The vast majority of anti-trans people are not enacting minimum standards to use toilets or do other sex-segregated activities: they're banning trans people completely, regardless of how well they pass, how much effort they've put in, or how sincere they are. That is the mainstream anti-trans view. Your view, if you have described it accurately, is fringe.
I don't propose banning trans people (whatever that means). I don't propose rounding trans people and herding them into camps. I propose making people use the public facilities and compete in the sporting events that concord with their sex. I'm not saying "trans people can't compete in sporting events ever"; I'm saying "if they wish to compete in sporting events, trans people must compete in the sporting events corresponding to their sex, just like everyone else".
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OK but that is literally the standard model of gender ideology in the real world, and if you argue for your interpretation you will get banned from half the internet and fired from every job in academia, hollywood, sillicon valley, and wherever else the woke reign supreme.
Go try and edit Wikipedia to reflect your belief that Elliot Page was a woman when he played a pregnant teenage girl. Heck, go on Wikipedia and edit the Elliot Page article to state that Page might be a man now but he still is biologically female and was born female (rather than merely being “assigned female at birth” by an ignorant doctor) If you manage to do that without getting banned or ganged upon by a rabid troupe of gender ideologues who will swiftly revert your changes, I might consider your hypothesis that gender ideology might possibly mean what you claim it means.
But who are we kidding? We both know that your conception of gender ideology doesn't exist outside The Motte. It's actually a fantastic example of the motte-and-baily fallacy. Only in The Motte, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, where people don't automatically agree that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, does transwoman mean “person who wishes they are a woman but is a male in reality”. Everywhere else it means “woman, and if you deny it you're banned”.
You're just nitpicking about terminology. Everyone knows that "AFAB" is a euphemism for "born female". Do you campaign against euphemisms in general or is it this one specific pair of euphemisms that you consider the great political issue of our time?
No, I don't think it's nitpicking to point out that "born female" implies "born biologically female" much more strongly than the related but different term "assigned female at birth".
I understand AFAB is often used as a euphemism for "biological female" but that relies on the fact that most transgender people are the biological sex they were assigned at birth. The entire point of the Khelif controversy is that he was assigned female at birth despite being biologically male.
And although I do think an encyclopedia should avoid euphemisms in favor of clear language, I didn't bring the AFAB/born female distinction up as part of a cruscade against euphemisms on Wikipedia, but to support my point that Wikipedia does not use these words interchangably, and the choice to describe Khelif as "born female" was intended to falsely suggest that Khelif is biologically female.
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I’m surprised @MartianNight isn’t aware of the “AFAB only” spaces controversy which is the woke way of saying “biological female only”. Also “AFAB vs AMAB socialisation”.
Woke people are quite aware of biological sex. There’s probably some horseshoe theory thing at play where both woke and gender critical people end up with similar viewpoints and are both dismissive of trans people and physical dysphoria.
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Wikipedia is a private organization and is allowed to set their policies as they please.
Employers should have a right to free association and should be able to fire someone for any reason they please.
I am not aware of this ever happening in the US. There may be some other nations that have done so, but those nations also tend to be highly censorious in other areas too (like how the UK has effectively outlawed a lot of Palestine support) so it seems to be a general free speech issue with them.
Same thing with this. Employer right to free association is based, government compelling something is not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The only instance I know of people actually trying to feign transness to enter sports was for the Daily Wire's movie LadyBallers in which they failed to get a man actually willing to undergo the transition requirements in joining the women's competitions.
Makes sense, nobody cares about women's sports to begin with so people aren't giving themselves hormones and surgeries for multiple years just to win in them. Every trans participant in women's sports I've heard of (the vanishingly few already) seem to have been transitioning for real and persisted even after they stopped participating.
Citing employers free association rights are rich when they will get sued by the government for creating a hostile work environment if they for example didn’t want trans.
I'm against anti discrimination laws and think they should be overturned.
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and they should choose different policies.
and they should choose different policies.
and they should choose different policies.
and they should choose different
policiescategories.People can freely choose to do bad things, and I can object to it. The government isn't the only valid target for disapproval.
I saw that pattern of arguments a lot more in "free speech" debates, where one side would highlight something that suppressed viewpoints, stifled debate, and prevented the free flow of information, while the other side would dismiss it because the American government did not violate their First Amendment.
Once the government-only frame is accepted, it's really hard to get the debate out of it.
XKCD 1357 argues that free speech is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to express a viewpoint. To this day, I'm still wondering why Randall Munroe didn't also apply this argument to censorship itself: Censorship is the ultimate concession because your only defense is that it's not literally illegal to get people fired for expressing thoughts you don't like.
Probably because it was a stupid argument to begin with, and the second worst strip on the site.
what's the first worst?
Half your age plus 7.
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I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. I do not believe that it should be illegal for Wikipedia to do what they do. But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's acceptable. I believe that it is unreasonable for Wikipedia to act in the way they do, and I (and others) criticize them on that basis.
And when Wikipedia is trying to operate on an idea of being an impartial open source collective of human information. Then on certain issues they hardcore advocate for certain opinion driven stances.
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You are allowed to disagree with them, you have just as much rights as any of them do. The only reason I'm pointing this out is because the comment included them as an example of
Wikipedia is not forcing you to "play along". If they were using the threat of violence in some form they would be. But as is, they're a private organization that gets to decide their own policies.
Note that I said "rewriting history and Wikipedia". There is absolutely compulsion involved here. In the happy event that the Wikimedia Foundation decided tomorrow that they would like to return to the ideal of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and unlocked all the trans-adjacent pages to allow mainstream views, they would be attacked and sued. And anyone else who publishes information that includes "deadnames" is declared as anti-trans and will, in some countries, be in serious trouble. (Not the US - yet - but not for lack of trying! I'm grateful that the US has the strongest free-speech protections in the world.)
This is 100% Orwellian. "We have always been at war with Eastasia." "Elliot Page has always been a man."
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http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/
The problem with this response has always been is that categories vary wildly between groups.
Even something as simple as "what is a sound?" gets a fierce debate when you ask if a tree falling in a forest with no one around makes one. No one contests the base level reality, that the air around the tree vibrates. They disagree over whether or not the vibrations itself counts as sound, or if it's the perception of said vibrations that do.
We see this everywhere. Is water wet? Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a palm tree a tree?
And the words themselves can shift depending on the context they're used in. The tomato as a fruit vs a vegetable is a common example of this. And Scott's own example of whales and dolphins as dag for the department of dag.
And words change over time too. And it's not just trans activists who commit this either. When someone refers to Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif or other intersex individuals with female presenting genital as a man, they have changed the definition of man and woman. They are applying a new modern definition over words far far older than chromosomes were known to exist for. Historically intersex people like Semenya and Khelif would have been women, it is the changed definition that says otherwise.
The trans debate is often like this. A debate over categories, a debate if sound is the vibrations or the perception. A debate if a tree is the morphological structure of a tall perinnial plant with a trunk and crown and thus the palm tree is included, or if a tree is that but also as a woody plant with secondary growth. Or if we wanted to define it even more exclusively, we could do a woody dicot with secondary growth and exclude stuff like conifers as well since they're of a different lineage. We can do all sorts of things like that! And we do. And we argue about them all the time. Categories are made for man, not man for the categories.
The problem is that Scott's essay was silly, socially motivated, and shot a hole through the chest of Rationalism as being anything more than postmodern word games with a nerd's coat of hobby paint.
HA! You know, I just realized that in context the phrasing highlights quite explicitly the TERF complaint that most trans discourse is inherently misogynistic. Indeed, the categories were made for man.
Can't believe it took me this long. I wish I could think Scott was being subtly Straussian but no chance of him being less than a true believer.
In other words, you just don't like it. Meta discussions about words and meaning have been here since the beginning of rationalism https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb
Speaking of, that's an example! "Man" in Scott's case is referring to humans, homo sapiens.
If you want to be reductive, sure. I don't like murder either, or green bell peppers.
Does it make sense to put all those in one category?
That is what I call damning with faint praise.
I can give actual substanted reasons for why I don't like murder, like "having people live in fear of violence makes them less economically efficient" or "allowing murder dismantles a functional society" or even just the basic "I think murder is morally wrong".
What you provide here is just fluff. Pure ad hominem.
It's disguised in a wordy way to appear sophisticated, but there is nothing substantial said here.
But even with the fluff, it's still wrong. These "word games" have been a part of rationalism since at least the sequences, thus Scott playing word games couldn't have blown a hole open, if there is a hole it was already there. So even the fluff is wrong.
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This is simply not true. Historically, most males with 5ARD (which is the condition that Semenya and Khelif have) would be considered men after going through puberty.
This varies between cultures, obviously, but for example, in the Dominican Republic boys with 5ARD are called guevedoces (literally: penis-at-twelve) and they are considered men who only grow a penis when they hit puberty. They aren't considered women, which makes sense, when they don't have any of the traits of women: they don't have breasts, wider hips, they don't have ovaries or a uterus, and cannot give birth. But they can impregnate women, like men, just like Caster Semenya has.
So historically, intersex males with 5ARD have been considered men, not women. You are changing definitions if you insist that Semenya and Khelif are women.
There's actually an incredibly easy way to check this simply by looking at how Semenya and Khelif were treated before their intersex conditions were known. Semenya was assigned female and raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Likewise Khelif was also assigned female, raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman. Their specific lives were as girls and women.
Yes it does vary among cultures, which is a great example of how even biological categories can be really fuzzy. After all, categorization systems are created by humans for humans. The map is not the territory.
It also depends on the intersex condition in question too, there is way more than just 5ARD so even if every case of 5ARD in every single culture throughout all of history was treated as men, we would still have tons of other fuzzy conditions to consider. And things like the SRY gene test can not be following the historic definition, as genes were not known until very recently. It is literally impossible unless time travel is invented and someone taught our ancient Germanic/Norse/whateverelseispartofEnglish ancestors about genetics.
You're dodging the central point, which is that ancient cultures already knew that geuevedoces weren't women. They called them "penis at twelve" exactly because they thought of them a special kind of boy that only grows his penis when he hits puberty (when most boys are born with them). They weren't considered women.
No, she didn't live life as a woman. She lived as a girl until puberty. Then when girls started to develop into women, Khelif developed into a man. He grew taller, with broad shoulders, and narrow hips, while his female peers developed wider hips and started menstruating. Khelif has never had a period in his life, because he lacks any female organs, which is how he knew he was male. He must have figured it out at age 15 or 16 at the latest. Since then, he has been living a lie.
Sure, but 5ARD is the most common and it is what Khelif and Semenya and a bunch of other male athletes who competed in women's sports have. Let's start by getting the gender ideologues to acknowledge that, then we can move into more obscure conditions.
Humans knew about the male and female sex before the discovery of chromosomes. You don't need to know the genetic details to understand that males and females are built differently. In any case, it doesn't excuse the current state of the world. It's settled science that Imane Khelif is a man in all ways that matter for the purpose of boxing.
One ancient culture, which also isn't even fully true as plenty do continue to live as women
So even in the specific Dominican Republic culture, 5ARD is not always man.
A man with female on their birth certificate and presumably female appearing outer genitalia treated as a woman in an extremely anti trans Muslim country. If Algeria with religious fatwas ordered against transitioning considers Khelif a woman, perhaps she is in many contexts and it's not a "lie".
Sure, but they didn't (couldn't) test it through genes but instead stuff like the outer genitalia. Which Semenya and Khelif both seem to have female presenting outer genitalia. They would have been considered female by many people in many areas such as the anti trans Algeria!
Declaring it settled doesn't mean it is. Again Algeria, a country even more anti trans than many of the people here, considers her as a woman. The doctors who handled her at birth considered her as female. Clearly there is still dispute.
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Bostock begs to differ.
Anti discrimination laws are largely bullshit and unnecessary (as any society that passes and maintains an anti discrimination law is one already broadly against discrimination) so they shouldn't really exist.
But in so much as they do exist, Bostock was a logical decision that discrimination against gay or trans employees is defacto discrimination against them for their sex, under the logic that allowing X from male employees (like certain names or clothes or medical treatments or spouses) but not female employees or vice versa requires sex discrimination.
They're not good, but it's not the court's job to decide what is and isn't good. It's to decide constitutionality and interpretation.
Bostock was not logical. The question is what did the words of the civil rights law mean (not quite the same as intent). It seems obviously clear that in the 1960s the words had a specific meaning and we then used a meaning in the 2020s to read into the historic statutes a specific requirement.
Stated differently, nobody but nobody would have believed in the 60s that the law passed created Bostock. Once you accept that, you have to believe that the meaning of law can change overtime.
Neil Gorsuch addressed this already as a staunch textualist.
Gorsuch is a remarkably consistent textualist when it comes to statutory interpretation. Maybe you disagree with textualism as a concept, but it is a coherent and understandable legal philosophy.
Congress should get rid of such anti discrimination laws, but that is not the court's job so long as they do not violate the constitution. It is to adjucate interpretation, and from a textualist standpoint I agree with Gorsuch that Title VII includes LGBT people.
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Sometimes the broader society is against discrimination, while some areas within it are less enlightened. (This was approximately the case with the origin of anti-discrimination laws.)
A 'something sort of like left-libertarianism-ist' solution might be to have anti-discrimination laws, to establish non-discrimination as the baseline standard, but allow businesses to buy exemption from such, with the price going to an organisation rendering assistance to whichever group with which the business owner does not wish to associate; in a major city with fifty bakeries, forty-nine of whom will cater anyone's wedding as long as their money's good, the fiftieth would pay a purely nominal sum to an LGBTQWERTY+-*/ advocates' firm, and be allowed to have a 'one-man-one-woman weddings only' policy; in a small town with two bakeries, both of whose owners hope to attract customers who resent that gay people are permitted to keep their blood inside their bodies, the fee would be increased until either one of them yields, or someone opens a third bakery and undercuts them.
What a lovely, neutral, non-inflammatory way to describe people who don't want to bake cakes for things against their conscience. Can we get non-discrimination laws that will force Jewish delis to serve bacon sandwiches too, or at least pay a fee which "would be increased until either one of them yields"? How about we make daycare centres cater to adult babies, or pay through the nose for not serving such?
One, I specified that one of them yielding is only one possible outcome; the price of an exemption would stop increasing even if all the incumbent businesses continue their discriminatory policies, if new businesses were founded to cater to the discriminated-against group and anyone who doesn't care one way or the other, and can offer lower prices by dint of not having to buy said exemptions.
Two, if you don't like the modest proposal on which I have speculated, and don't like the status quo of legally forbidding discrimination, what solution would you propose to the problem of all the businesses in an area having a policy of "We don't sell to your kind."?
If you were in charge of U. S. Federal civil-rights policy in the mid-20th century, and could get any solution you saw fit passed by the Legislative Branch, put in place by the Executive Branch, and upheld by the Judicial Branch, and were informed by whatever source you would find sufficiently convincing that, in the absence of Federal intervention, the southern states would not moderate on their own, and Black people in the southern states would continue to find very few businesses willing to sell to them, and effectively none that were either integrated or separate-but-actually-equal, thus giving rhetorical ammunition to the Communist powers, ultimately leading to the West losing the Cold War?
The standard answer to that seems to be "set up your own" (in the context of driving out BadThink online spaces). At the most extreme, if nobody will sell to black people or gay people or trans lawyers, then the black, gay, and trans lawyer people set up their own businesses selling to their own people.
That's the place where government can legitimately intervene: you can choose not to sell to these people, but you can't stop them or anyone else setting up shops to sell to them.
It has to be equally applied, if it's going to be applied. No more "okay we'll rule that the Christian fellowship college society has to allow atheists to run for leadership, but we're not going to compel the Afro-Latino-Hispanic engineers' club to allow white people to run for leadership, that would be absurd!" kind of interventions. If atheists can be in charge of the Bible reading classes, white guys can be in charge of the black Spanish engineers.
But nobody wants that, they want to force the holdouts to capitulate to the new régime.
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This was actually one of the reasons why big business pushed for the anti discrimination laws. General society wasn't open to blatant discrimination anymore, but there was strong enough pockets left they feared it could create a market niche and enable smaller competition to take their more bigoted customers away. The solution then was to make sure that couldn't happen by enshrining it everywhere as illegal instead.
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This is strawman libertarianism. People should have a right to do these things, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be criticized for doing so. The only thing that libertarians require here is that it not be made illegal. Nobody, of course, is saying that it should be illegal for Wikipedia to have pro-trans policies.
And if you say "that isn't a strawman, I really believe that", I don't believe you, unless you follow that to its logical conclusion and say that, for instance, employees should be able to fire people based on race. But I bet you would reject that conclusion.
In what way have you not been allowed to criticize Wikipedia?
Yes. Government actions and private actions are different things. Government has a monopoly on violence and everything they do is with violence backing them up. Individual bad actors do sometimes use violence too (we can not constantly monitor and control every person 24/7), but that is illegal and we lock them up and punish them for it when we can prove it.
Or put it this way, John calls his boss's wife a whore.
His boss punches John in response: Not acceptable.
His boss calls the police chief and John is locked up via government force: Not acceptable
His boss fires John: Acceptable. He has free association for his business.
I believe they should be able to do that if they wish. Let the market and the private actors they associate with respond to that as they please.
You have implied that criticism of Wikipedia does not fit libertarian principles. Unless I am saying that Wikipedia should be made illegal, criticism of Wikipedia does fit libertarian principles.
You are allowed to criticize Wikipedia, of course you are. I am allowed to point out that Wikipedia has their rights as a private organization and their exercise of their rights does not constitute "forcing" a person into anything.
The same way if I were to kick you out of my house for chewing on my couch doesn't force you to not chew on couches. You can go chew on your own. It just means you can not chew on my couch in my home since I have the right to remove you from my home for whatever reason (including no reason!) as I deem. As you leave, feel free to call me a fascist couch Nazi or something.
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You were the one who implied he shouldn't criticize Wikipedia, by giving the "but it's legal" retort. Come on now.
But he said
He is allowed to criticize Wikipedia. In the same way I am allowed to point out that Wikipedia exercising their rights is not "forcing" him to do anything.
If Wikipedia was actually forcing him to do something that would be wrong. But they aren't.
He is also welcome to start his own version with deadnames and deadpronouns if he feels like it.
I don't believe you. Not for a second.
Just look at the Kiwi Farms. One of the first attacks came from Jonathan Yaniv, a surprisingly powerful Canadian man who used transgender ideology to harass women into waxing his balls. When all criticism of his actions was censored from every corner of the Internet, you might have said:
"Build your own website!"
Ok, most documentation of Yaniv's activities got largely concentrated on the Kiwi Farms. But then Yaniv directly targeted its data center in Buffalo, NY and got them to physically unplug its devices by sending in false complaints.
"Build your own data center/ISP!"
Sure, whatever. It looks like Josh managed to get a dedicated ASN for KF and have found other ISPs that are fine peering with it. But now some random video game emulator developer committed suicide, therefore the domain name for the site must be terminated.
"Build your own domain registrar!"
It actually costs thousands of dollars a year to become your own domain registrar, so after getting dropped from DreamHost the domain was simply moved over to Cloudflare, but for the sake of argument, I'm ignoring that.
The next volley comes from a motivated group of trans activists, led by one particular trans activist (Keffals) gloating about deplatforming Destiny for wrongthink opinions. This group manages to get Cloudflare to #DropKiwifarms. Without Cloudflare, the Kiwi Farms is limited on options for DDoS mitigation.
"Build your own DDoS mitigation!"
Ok, sure. Josh managed to vibe-code Tartarus. It was that easy!
I'm just going to gloss over that after Cloudflare dropped, the site floundered around several DDoS mitigation solutions before Josh decided to roll his own, and Tartarus was actually only installed this year as the successor to several attempts.
I'm also going to super-gloss over the fact that DDoS mitigation is a lot more complicated than just "install X" and requires actual thousands of dollars in infrastructure to handle attacks! (If it was that easy, half the Internet wouldn't be gated behind Cloudflare right now.)
I think you see where this is going. I haven't even talked about:
"Build your own payment processors!" because they can just ban you and you have no appeal, you don't even get to know why you were banned. Building your own Internet cost thousands of dollars? Tough luck. Eat shit and do it without being able to raise funds from 99% of the population.
"Build your own forum software!" because yes, they can and will just revoke your license off of the word of an insane British man. (Josh is in fact trying to build his own forum software.)
"Build your own... legal firm?" Did you know that no one is going to stop you from filing frivolous lawsuits, forever, and you don't have to pay a dime for it, and the forum has been withstanding asinine litigation for years at this point, to the tune of several thousands of dollars in legal fees? And I haven't even talked about the threat actor who does have money to spend on lawfare? No? Well, now you do.
I think you get my point. Not a single time has the "start your own" argument ever been stated in good faith. Not a single proponent of such an argument actually wishes for their interlocutor to start their own website/ISP/data center/DDoS mitigation/payment processor/forum software/everything. This interpretation assumes that the problem of the censor (in this case, the trans activist) is merely that dissenting opinions are expressed on a platform they share with them, and that everything would be fine if those opinions were expressed elsewhere. The "we're just showing you the door!" school of censorship, in other words. This assumption is false.
No, what the "start your own" argument is actually saying is this: "I don't want your thoughts to be expressed, so I am going to censor you. However, I still want to have even the smallest of fig leafs that I somehow support free expression. To that end, I am going to point out that it is possible for you to start your own website/ISP/data center/yada yada. Nevermind the huge costs of doing this with few benefits in return, I do this to imply that because this option is theoretically available to you, you don't have anything to complain about. Now I don't have to concede that what I am doing is in fact censorship." And even this nanometer-sized fig leaf is proven false, when time after time, you build your own X and they do everything in their power to censor your X anyway.
So I am going to say no, @Jiro can't just start his own Wikipedia, and moreover, he shouldn't have to. When Wikipedia is still a frequently cited source seen as credible in the popular imagination, it ought to accurately reflect reality. That it doesn't and actively resists attempts to correct it is a travesty. And "just start your own Wikipedia bro" is not a credible counterargument to any criticism of Wikipedia not accurately reflecting reality, when it's highly likely to be targeted by trans activists and censored in the same way as the original.
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The old "recreate pillarized civilization from the ground up" retort, really?
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The case of rapist Isla Bryson, still referred to by Wikipedia as a 'woman', literally brought down the Scottish government because Nicola Sturgeon could not be made to admit the possibility that putting a man who was going to jail for raping women into a prison full of women might be inappropriate.
Is it appropriate to put a man who is going to jail for raping men into a prison full of men?
Solitary's always an option, but I suspect the "put men in women's prisons" folx aren't too fond of that for other reasons.
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Yes.
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In sports, there are not actually "Men's leagues" and "Women's leagues". There are "Women's leagues" and "Open leagues". The Women's leagues are a special category created because they generally can't offer table stakes level competition in the Open leagues.
Just so with prisons.
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