site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24670 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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.

2
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the UK held an election for local authorities, in which Labour were soundly trounced, losing a whopping 1,375 seats. Almost immediately, Labour back-benchers began clamouring for incumbent prime minister Keir Starmer (he of "two-tier" fame) to resign.

This morning, he followed that recommendation.

Starmer is expected to be succeeded in the role by Andy Burnham, former minister for health under Gordon Brown. I was unfamiliar with him before this morning, but those more familiar with his political career are generally unimpressed:

As health minister, he was liked by officials but known to be indecisive and incurious about policy detail. He made party-pleasing noises about being anti-privatisation but essentially passed through without touching the sides. Once he became mayor of Manchester, he no longer had to even bother with that onerous stuff. On national issues he could make gestures in the politically expedient direction without having to square them with his record or his plans.

The result is that he can sound startlingly vacuous. We all know the remark about not wanting to be “in hock” to the bond markets, without seeming to understand what bond markets are or why we are in hock to them, but it was hardly an anomaly. He mouths the phrase “fiscal rules” without ever giving the impression that he knows what they are or why they matter. Here’s how he answered a question about the EU, during Labour’s conference last September:

Journalist: “Rejoin the EU or stay out?”

Andy Burnham: “I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime, I want to rejoin the European Union. I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The EU benefitted this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.”

I’m sorry to break the flow of my Flaubertian prose, but - fuck me. I believe in the unions of all kinds. It’s like something from an essay by a primary school pupil. That’s the extent of his thinking, on one of the most important geopolitical questions of the age?

Similarly, Spiked characterises him as "just Keir Starmer in jeans".

Get ready for the UK's seventh prime minister in a decade. I wonder if he'll stick around until the next general election. At least he'll last longer than Liz "Lettuce" Truss.

We're seeing a lot of caretaker governments by nonentities in Europe these days. They get these unstable coalitions to try to keep the "far right" (usually the center left actually) out of power, which are unpopular and constantly lose elections, but always staple together the ruling class to keep the troglodytes out. Meanwhile parties on the actual right are forming to outflank the relatively liberal (Reform, AFD, FN etc) opposition parties.

The opposition becomes steadily less controlled.

AFD

Has to fight tooth and nail to take and hold ground while maintaining popular support, finding enough people willing to get themselves ostracized for them, and walking a tightrope to not be banned, and it's taking just about all the right-wing anti-establishment energy in Germany to do so. There exist no "actual" right-wing parties in Germany that are actually right-wing and actually political parties that have the slightest chance of doing a similar or better job within the forseeable future.

I think Labour might have done better under a coalition government actually.

They got a large but brittle majority based purely on the Tories collapsing and then had to square what they had to do for the economy both with the promises they made to sweep into power (no broad tax rises which meant trying to squeeze taxes everywhere else which both pissed off specific segments of the population and may have caused employment issues) and with the ideology of the backbenchers (who want to do things like lift the limit the cap on benefits for children during a moment when they need every pound they can get, there was a bit of whining about Mahmood's immigration turn but it seems to have gone through)

If they couldn't get anything done without some other party those people could be the bad guys and take the blame.

I wonder if he'll stick around until the next general election.

How long after Starmer's replacement is installed until the "not directly elected - no mandate - not legitimate - call an election" drums start beating?

The media always run a "the new PM needs to call an early general election to seek a personal mandate" campaign because general elections are good for business. The only PM to listen was Theresa May, and look how well it worked out for her. Burnham will ignore them.

We don't have a presidential system of government in the UK, and the media wanting one is not a reason to change the constitution, let alone a process for changing it.

The media always run a "the new PM needs to call an early general election to seek a personal mandate" campaign because general elections are good for business.

Not related to the UK situation but I wonder if anyone else has given thought to just outright banning all sorts of op-eds from any media that pretends to be purveyor of news?

It appears to me that a lot of media outlets use the prestige from running news stories to elevate their opinion columns over that of some random guy ranting on the internet.

They'll just slip their opinion pieces into their news stories, partially just via editorializing, partially via which interviewees/quotes they choose to include (with or without pushback/context, as desired).

So basically, what's being done now, but without the pressure relief valve of being able to have op-eds.

It is already happening. Here is Farage. And also Jacob Rees-Mogg

Edited to give two examples, not just one.

Keir Starmer was an underrated PM. Wokeness was scaled back under Keir Starmer. The great awokening happened under the Tories and the UK is in many ways less woke now than when then tories left office. Immigration has declined immensely since Keir Starmer took office. He kept the UK out of the Iran war, he started the construction of new nuclear power and he revitalized the UK armed forces.

As a rightwinger Keir Starmer has been far more successful than Boris Johnson.

Unbelievable how worthless the tories are. I can't think of a single thing they even made motions towards conserving.

I think the best diagnosis is that Starmer has allowed things to drift. Some things were drifting in the correct direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the correct direction under Starmer. In particular, gross immigration is falling back to a pre-Boriswave normal and net immigration is falling further (and possibly negative) due to remigration of EU citizens post-Brexit. Some things were drifting in the wrong direction under Sunak and have continued to drift in the wrong direction under Starmer. In particular, the minimum wage is drifting upwards faster than the productivity of unskilled workers (Counterintuitively, this was a Conservative policy dating back to the 2015 election) and the construction industry is drifting into overregulated paralysis.

The great awokening happened under the Tories and the UK is in many ways less woke now than when then tories left office.

None of this had anything to do with them or Starmer. The UK has no cultural sovereignty because it doesn't control the internet: the Americans do. To the extent wokeness has receded in the UK, it's because it's receded in the United States.

And I don't think it's actually receded: I think woke power centres are coyly biding their time while the right clowns itself in the most ridiculous ways imaginable. Never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.

Mark my words, next election, woke will return with a vengeance, and they will go Nuremberg on the right.

I mean, from a political perspective are you going to throw up a connected nonentity or someone with a promising career ahead of him to be a company man PM for an unpopular government?

Andy Burnham is 100% a "vibes" politician, and it's worked well for him. He's very popular as the Mayor of Manchester, heading up a flagship bipartisan project (devolution to the North), and his absence from Westminster has left him untainted by both the bitterness of internal feuding and the failure of Starmer's government. He hearkens back to an older Labour that working-class voters felt cared about them. It's nostalgic anti-Thatcherism, but with a sense that if you took him round yer nan's for a cuppa she'd like him. "What a nice lad!" I wouldn't underestimate how sticky this could be with the elderly voters who dominate UK politics. If he can avoid substantive disasters like the one that sank Truss, he's Labour's best candidate to fight Reform. "Aw listen luv, it was always that Thatcher, it's like we're back in the old days, Nigel wants to bring 'er back 'e does..."

He does have a basic problem with governing, though. Well, two. The only critically important issues in British politics are the economy and immigration (healthcare and housing being downstream of economics). Burnham wants to be, and sells himself as, different from Starmer on economics. Lots of soft-soap pieces in the New Statesman about him bringing back "communalism". But British economic policy is hitting the hard constraints of the bond markets. Burnham's voters and MPs won't accept anything less than more spending, he's committed to following Starmer's fiscal rules limiting borrowing - rating agencies are saying things which, translated from econspeak, are serious warnings not to break those rules - and there's just not much fiscal room to squeeze the rich without hitting boomer homeowners and thereby committing electoral suicide. Many ways this can go wrong and few ways it can go right. On immigration, I'm sure Burnham is a true believer, but so was Starmer, and organized mobs burning down buildings tends to scare the hell out of politicians. I actually suspect he's more likely to keep tacking softly to the right on immigration, to avoid being on the unpopular side of both issues and to give himself breathing room on economic policy.

This comes to a broader, more speculative point: the UK (not just the YooKay) has become structurally ungovernable. In order to get elected, you have to match the other party's wildly unrealistic promises. When you get elected, you can't deliver, because your room to carry on down the safe path of procrastination is running out, there's no room to give the voters what you promised, and any path that would deliver real growth in the long run carries electorally unacceptable short-term pain (maybe an advantage of a Presidential system which at least gives you two years to act without an immediate leadership challenge). As 2010's outgoing chief secretary to the Treasury wrote to his successor, "Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left." In taking the Blairite road, where perception management is the chief tool of government, and all that matters is the next news cycle, for 29 years, the UK is coming to the end of that road. We're seeing the harbingers: every PM since Cameron's followed the same trajectory, where they get elected, popularity bump, polls crash faster than a shitcoin. I see no way out except slamming into whatever reckoning is at the end of it.

Andy Burnham: “I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime, I want to rejoin the European Union. I believe in the unions of all kinds. The union of the UK. The EU benefitted this country. Trade unions. People prosper more when they’re part of unions.”

That is absolutely hilarious. The Thick of It is a documentary, proven again.

The UK will soon be awash with quiet batpeople.

lol that was the other clip I debated linking.

Both your links about why "people familiar with Andy Burnham's political career are unimpressed" are to articles by London-based right-wingers. They may be correct on the merits about Burnham's character (and I think Leslie is), but they are not familiar with the facts on the ground in Greater Manchester.

Burnham's constituents in Greater Manchester are impressed - he has won three elections with 60+% of the vote in territory which while Labour-friendly is not that Labour friendly - Labour only won 43% of the vote in Greater Manchester in their 2024 General Election landslide. And then he wins the Makerfield by-election comfortably, beating Reform in one of the to 10% most Reform-friendly seats* in the country with a campaign that focussed on bringing out his personal vote. And the rest of the left are impressed with Burnham precisely because he is popular in his turf. You can't do what he did without being either a more effective governor or a dramatically better communicator than your opponents. Part of what he has done is allowed Manchester proper to get richer** - there is a common cynical view that the structure of local government in the North of England was deliberately set up by Thatcher to encourage northern cities to fight with their suburbs rather than allying with them for regional prosperity (and potentially against London-based Tories). Burnham has managed to convince the rest of Greater Manchester that a successful Manchester is good for places like Makerfield, and delivered on this.

I don't think anyone can fix Labour's problems now - the Tories left the country in enough of a mess that the only workable approach was to double down on (mostly correctly) blaming the Tories (similarly to the tactics used by the incoming coalition in 2010). Within the first 100 days there should have been a big speech with the gist of "Sorry. The Tories ruined the country more than I thought. I am afraid you are going to be suffering the consequences of Tory failure for the next few years while we try to fix the problems". To do that now requires Burnham to turn on Starmer as well as the Tories.

And I don't think Burnham is the kind of politician who would do that if he could, for similar reasons to Ian Leslie. I think there is a "Burnhamism" that could improve the UK in the same way it has improved Greater Manchester (see the writings of Tom Forth for an idea of what it would look like***), but it isn't the left-populist message that Burnham is selling to London-based lefties, and in any case would need a full term without getting blown off by events to deliver benefits on a national level.

* Makerfield isn't just the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to form a government after the next election, it's the kind of seat Reform need to win if they want to remain politically relevant. On uniform national swing, it is the 29th Reform target seat.

** Opponents of Burnham say that credit for the economic improvement in Manchester should go to Richard Leese who led the City Council in Manchester proper from 1996 to 2021, not Burnham. This is mostly correct, but it is significant that Burnham supported Leese rather than sabotaging him in order to appeal to left-idiotarians who don't like sensible pro-business local politics and pensioners in the burbs who don't like change.

*** Short summary: A diagnosis of the British Problem as "the potential of the North of England, and particularly cities like Manchester proper, is being wasted" and a programme of promoting local and regional initiative in the North (including normal pro-local-business boosterism from local Labour politicians like Burnham who might otherwise be business-sceptical, although Burnham personally won't be the face of this any more once he is PM), soft YIMBYism (you don't need to "crush the NIMBYs" in the North - they are a lot less organised and powerful than in the Home Counties), and targetted investment in fixing the biggest transport problems in the region. But even though this sounds milquetoast, it isn't compatible with low-energy managerial politics in a geronto-democracy.

I agree with your critique of the OP, good to have the Manchester context in there. I would strongly caveat the Makersfield point: besides Burnham being a good campaigner and having the party apparatus focused on it, voters just really really like having the PM be their MP. Wouldn't you like it if your House rep was the President? Reform also ran a disaster-class of a campaign (possibly a sign of the future, possibly a one-off).

Re: a working Burnhamism, I think the London class are a problem for him in a different way than pure opposition. A working Burnhamism would be purely pragmatic, but the London types are already surrounding him with a "brain trust" that will try to make some ideology out of it, and that ideology will always happen to favour the status quo and the QUANGO/NGO/Civil Service/media blob who provide the "brains". I doubt that Burnham has the ability to bulldoze through court politics like that.

Reform also ran a disaster-class of a campaign (possibly a sign of the future, possibly a one-off).

They had a candidate who was as thick as pigshit (believing that "let's nominate the local plumber" was a simple way of hacking by-elections in the Manchester suburbs) and had a history of obnoxiously sexist social media posts. But I didn't notice the campaign as such (which, like most potentially winning by-election campaigns, was run by Farage's people) going badly wrong in ways which weren't simply candidate quality.

I doubt that Burnham has the ability to bulldoze through court politics like that.

If he can, it will be by enlisting the Labour Party in the country outside London as an ally against the Deep State. Some of Starmer's silliest failures, with the Chagos deal being the one that gets talked about on the Motte, involve not pushing back against dumb ideas coming out of the Deep State. Five minutes talking to backbenchers representing provincial seats would stop a PM who was in touch with his Party making those mistakes.

Apologies for being unclear - standing a terrible candidate, then realizing it and trying to hide them, was what I meant by a disaster-class that might be a one-off (because it doesn't generalize to races with better candidates). I can't speak to the mechanics of the campaign.

A reference solely to a mayorality would work if this was someone like Sadiq Khan, who hasn't done anything save be mayor of London, but Burnham had plenty of time as an MP before being banished to Manchester. In fact this isn't even the first time he will run to be leader of the Labour party, having been trounced by Corbyn back when he emerged as leader.

He was just as much an empty suit in his first time round as an MP as he is described now. The time in Manchester might well have given him essential experience and he will burst forth with vim and vigour, but I wouldn't bet on it. All signs point to him basically being leader by default, as one of the only vaguely popular Labour politicians around (aside, perhaps, from Khan, though I suspect Labour are wise enough to realise what a disaster he actually is).

I think your point about the Tories leaving such a disaster behind is well known by Labour, but it is this exact thing which is dragging them down. They have been sucked into the same fallacies that blight most online discussion, assuming that people who hold different views - especially right wing views - are not just wrong, but stupid and evil as well. Otherwise why would they believe in these things?

As such, the answer to all the country's problems are simply to not be the Tories. To be, as the now infamously embarrassing tweets say, the adults in the room. Keir Starmer and his supporters no doubt fancied that he was a sombre, serious politician who would succeed by sheer virtue, no need for leadership or ideas. Burnham will almost certainly be much the same

Hijacking a little here but my understanding is that actual right-wing parties are forming in Europe now -- at least right-wing enough to mention the possibility of remigration -- and I'm wondering what's going to happen once that catches on, even as it belatedly occurs to them that, due to the migrant voting bloc, democratic solutions are permanently off the table.

When will that realization happen? And what happens then?

Political gridlock and increasing political polarization. Lowered trust in society and increased conflict. Basically nothing good.

Brazilification.

Academia vs. racist memes

A new paper in Evolutionary Human Sciences has been making rounds.
Memeing Scientific Racism: The Digital Reframing of Racialist Ideologies – “examines how racialised memes circulating on X revive scientific racism”.

The most intriguing feature of the paper is the way its subject of study is presented. Though the aim is to dissect bigoted memes online with Science, the author deemed it inappropriate to grant her readers direct access to the offending material. The four case-study memes are “presented exclusively through schematic reconstructions created using standard image-editing tools, including limited AI-assisted transformations”, bringing to mind some SCP Foundation containment protocol for high-caliber memetic hazards.

I’m certain that the author believes she is doing genuine research investigating a pressing problem, so that’s the angle I'll consider it from. As far as its scientific value goes, my feelings are mixed. Though the author clearly did a lot of legwork collecting nearly 70 memes, and namedrops things from the Dark Enlightenment and human biodiversity to effective altruism, and genuinely attempts to figure out what makes memes compelling and facilitates their spread, the analysis of the memes seems incomplete.

One of the case studies, a meme that was circulating since 2018, originally features a crude outline of a man drawn in soyjack tradition saying:

“I'm sorry your daughter was raped by a retarded cannibal, but we need him for the football team”

The rhetorical thrust, as I see it, is to contrast some of the more shallow sounding supposed benefits of mass migration with its most lurid observed effects.

(In February this year a big account, owned by an actual left winger with real-life clout and bearing a striking resemblance to the meme character made this post:

“The migration policies of Reform and Restore Britain would destroy football throughout the UK. Have those planning to vote for them thought about that?”

Which is an interesting case of prophetic hyperstition)

" Ethically modified" version of the meme in the paper turns the man into a simpler, more friendly looking figure changing the text to:

“I'm sorry
[text removed]
but we need him for the football team”

And here's what the author has to say about it:

“The soyjak example in Figure 2 (M60)...addresses a father whose daughter has been “raped by a retarded cannibal,” yet insists that the perpetrator must be protected for the sake of a football team.”
“The soyjak stands in for a caricatured progressive whose commitments conflict with self-preservation”
“…racial typology of the hypersexual, predatory, uncontrollable Black male”

Though this goes in the right direction, nothing reflects comprehension of the joke, of what the meme tries to convey.
Refraining from including the original memes is a serious self-imposed limitation. She could talk about how the slovenly scribbled caricature (edit: come to think of it, the visual style of these kinds of memes might well merit actual artistic investigation) serves to dehumanize open border supporters, and a grotesque crime is juxtaposed to a relatively marginal example of benefits of mass migration (which are, of course, countless) as a tool of propaganda.
Though the image of the author frowning and making notes as she browses racist jokes on Twitter brings me joy, this paper appears methodologically limited, and more research into the threat of racist memes online is likely required.

The progressive would never admit to being a scientific racists. But this is scientific racism: “ “The migration policies of Reform and Restore Britain would destroy football throughout the UK”

I don’t think it’s a big leap to go from “some population groups run faster” to “some population groups do management/science better”.

Twitter went off yesterday about how all the African countries suck at football despite having far more genetic stock of football talent. France is the lead country in producing World Cup players (around 100 players). African teams have a lot of African players born in Europe. But they can’t develop players in their own country. A lot like the resource curse which only applies to certain countries.

On the other hand, if you look at the literal best in the world players- overwhelmingly, the superstars are white or mostly white, Mbappe is the only counterexample I can think of. You just tend to see poor people overrepresented in athletics because for the borderline pro level talent, they have less opportunity cost in gambling on the lottery ticket. Same reason thé NFL is heavily black in the US- but the star players are not.

https://www.transfermarkt.com/g-statistik/wertvollstespieler/marktwertetop

Just eyeballing the current top 20 most valuable players I'd say approximately half are African descent. NFL has gotten more black in recent years as quarterbacks have had a surge of African representation as well. Meanwhile the NBA has gotten more European but that's likely due to club preparation being superior to the USA model.

I thought NBA getting whiter was mostly a result of countries with very high average height began playing more basketball two decades ago. Basically the Balkans entering basketball.

I think it's a combination of both. Balkans definitely a factor but also the European club systems are producing a lot of African talent as well. There seems to be some benefits to ostensibly being able to identify talent at a young age and keep the same structures around it for 8 years instead of the kinda-disjointed American system of school -> elite school -> University etcetera

At least in the former Yugoslavia, where some of the tallest people in Europe are, basketball was already very popular during the Cold War. The History section of the Wikipedia article on the European Basketball Championship has an entire subsection titled "Rise of Yugoslavia" about the 1970s. See also the team statistics – a number of wins in the 70s and 80s.

My perception is that Croatian basketball, at least, is, if anything, well past its prime. But I don't care for basketball at all and I've never watched a game, so take that with a grain of salt.

It might be that people from the region only started playing in the NBA more recently. I understand Dražen Petrović was (one of?) the first. But even that was nearly 40 years ago.

If you go back in time too, you'd probably be awash in Brazilians, who are a mess to figure out.

Eyeballing the Paperbag test through to like 50 makes it look still roughly 50-50. Though probably more chance of underestimating Latino/Arab-passing halfies than overestimating the African representation.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "superstar" and "white".

Same reason thé NFL is heavily black in the US- but the star players are not.

I mean this just isn’t remotely accurate. Excluding quarterbacks (of whom, several “star players” like Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, and Jalen Hurts are black) and tight ends, the NFL’s high-level talent is extremely black/non-white. (Justin Jefferson, Myles Garrett, Micah Parsons, Ja’Marr Chase, Jaxson Smith-Njigba, Jahmyr Gibbs, Bijan Robinson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, etc.)

Mahomes is 50-50 probably even a little over 50% white. Super white mom with black dad. Hurts is probably 25-75 looking at skin tones. Njigba and Brown are both white moms too.

Once you drop the 1 drop rule the nfl becomes probably a little more white than black. With some positions being darker black.

The progressive would never admit to being a scientific racists.

Like everything else, cognitive science is subject to The Movement and its ends: to the extent that it serves the purpose at hand, IQ is as rock-solid science as universal gravitation; to the extent that it doesn't, it's lies that must be quelled and suppressed.

I tend to be a Cofnasian about wokeness (remove the "equality thesis" and it collapses) but stuff like this does make me wonder.

I suppose you can say that saying IQs are low is fine. Saying groups have lower IQ is very much not fine.

That's where the left often find themselves in trouble intellectually. They'll spend plenty of time examining, reposting, and commenting on the IQ differences of Republican voters vs. Democrat voters. Once you examine group IQ differences along racial lines the conversations end and the silencing begins.

Nah, if someone put out a study showing J6'ers had below-average IQ, it would be enshrined in liturgical canon immediately.

Whenever a study is pushed that attempts to tie conservatism with low IQ it'll generally get thousands of updoots on the science subreddits

Yes but that's not a group based on an immutable characteristic. That's the red rag.

The media was all over J6'ers about being broke idiots. Literally.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.

So, a population of 125 comes up as perhaps one standard deviation above expected random sampling.

This is selection bias at a cartoonish level. But it's dressed up with enough circumstantial relevance and high-minded sounding statistical framing that the self-assured PMC'er reading it can go, "Oh, of course, those crazy MAGA folks are aggrieved because they haven't the sense to manage their money properly. Harumph. I, on the other hand, am always wise in my investments. Why, just look at what we did for young Junior - $300,000 for a degree from Am'erst (not Am-herst ... the "h" is for the peasants)."

Hat tip as ever to Scott's idea that the media doesn't lie in a factual sense, but just frames and reports selectively to, nonetheless, alter the perception.

It's an argument by a lawyer. They're not expected to be intellectually honest, or consistent across cases.

As Nick Land put it:

The notion that retardation is a mitigating rather than aggravating factor in regards to criminal culpability is sufficient on its own to condemn an entire legal philosophy.

... "Congenitally incapable of avoiding criminality even if he wanted to, so innocent I guess."

-- This is the kind of argument the technical term 'shitlib' was coined for.

Yeah, at least for violent aggression, I think it's a ridiculous case to make. Many Down's syndrome people are severely retarded, to the point that they indeed cannot be held fully accountable for things like theft. Even if they sorta understand money, it's more in the 4-year-old sense of "handing over some random green papers and coins is a ritual you do before you walk out of the store with stuff", rather than any understanding of monetary value and transaction. The level of understanding common in Congress, basically. Yet even among downies and Congresspeople, it is well-understood that you can't just maul random people on the street and walk off with their stuff. Even most animals that grow up around humans don't have trouble with this.

I have to wonder what percentage of people with Down's Syndrome would be worried that putting too much stuff on an island would tip it over?

Edit: rephrased.

I think the progressive would claim that immigrants overperform in football because they are oppressed and excluded from higher education and white collar employment opportunities. Still a dumb argument, as it implies that getting rid of oppression would also "destroy football throughout the UK," but not an endorsement of HBD.

Don't stop there; the argument can be taken further:

"Sports are one of the few truly meritocratic domains, so if society were to become truly meritocratic it would have similar demographics as sports"

I don’t think it’s a big leap to go from “some population groups run faster” to “some population groups do management/science better”.

It's also not a big leap from "men are significantly stronger than women" to "and this is almost certainly paired with related psychological differences" and yet it's resisted valiantly. Even while feminists also say - correctly - that men are the dominant major suppliers of violence.

You don't have to have a coherent position. You just have to have a position that isn't on the side of racists. You can't deny that men are stronger (well, mostly not; the trans stuff has been sidling up to that position and suffering predictable consequences) or some people are better at sprinting. You have to deny that some races are smarter. Just always pick the pro-migration position.

Even while feminists also say that men are - correctly - the dominant major suppliers of violence.

Ah, but that's easy enough to blame on society and culture.

You can't deny that men are stronger (well, mostly not; the trans stuff has been sidling up to that position and suffering predictable consequences) or some people are better at sprinting

I've seen it claimed -- in complete seriousness -- that men are only stronger/better at sports due to training and nutrition from an early age.

I've seen it claimed -- in complete seriousness -- that men are only stronger/better at sports due to training and nutrition from an early age.

I dated a girl who believed this.

This belief, objectively far more deluded and delusionary than literal flat earthism, is not so uncommon, and not only among not very bright and curious people who learn about the world they live in only by random watching of TV and tiktok.

See this giga self own of aspiring rationalist from last year.

"Children Believe Every Lie" and "How To Believe False Things" should be required reading for any rationalist.

Did she have an eating disorder and did she ever do sports?

The only way I think in the US a woman might think that boys systematically get better nutrition than girls is if they have an eating disorder which they justify to themselves as "everyone does it."

The only way I think in the US a woman might think that boys systematically get better nutrition than girls is if they have an eating disorder which they justify to themselves as "everyone does it."

I think you're underestimating the extent to which US education (all education?) involves telling students, "Who are you going to believe, the trusted experts or your lying eyes?"

She was Indian. To the best of my knowledge she never had an eating disorder, nor was particularly sporty.

Oh that makes more sense. If she was raised in certain parts of India I could see that being a real thing.

Yeah most of the women I know with such takes were the ones socialized to have essentially zero exposure to sports and doubly zero to co-ed sports.

People believe all sorts of dumb things, and Americans in general believe a lot of dumb things about nutrition in particular. ‘Boys get better nutrition than girls’ is mostly false, but when the two sexes start to choose their eating patterns there is a difference, and a few female specific nutrient deficiencies(mostly iron) do hang on in the modern US(although no one is stopping women from eating steak).

Did she really believe it truly or did she claim it?

These things often function as a collective social "shit test" to see which men are willing to actually voice disagreement with patently absurd ideas.

But that only pushes the question back to why did that culture emerge?

It’s resisted valiantly because it represents a vicious motte and bailey, where “related psychological differences” covers whatever one can get away with. Difference in preferences becomes difference in ability, which becomes difference in moral value, which becomes difference in rights. I am not exaggerating. The innate differences of men and women have been used to excuse systematic denial of women’s rights. Same for white vs. black.

you just have to have a position that isn’t on the side of racists.

This, but unironically. The merest suggestion of group differences attracts a cloud of more or less the worst (Internet) partisans you can imagine. Just ask Scott.

Difference in preferences becomes difference in ability, which becomes difference in moral value, which becomes difference in rights. I am not exaggerating. The innate differences of men and women have been used to excuse systematic denial of women’s rights. Same for white vs. black.

This has been the standard excuse that I've kept encountered from those on the left who deny HBD or anything similar to it on ethical grounds, but I've found it to be rather lacking. As you write, it has been used to excuse denial of rights based on genetic categorization - which had been going on for literally centuries and likely millennia before anyone ever knew anything about genetic causes of average differences in behavior. And starting from a world where basically all of human history had unequal rights for women vs men and blacks vs whites (vs yellows vs reds vs etc), equal rights were achieved not through scientific arguments about genetics. Whether or not genetic reasoning would be successfully used to justify the implementation of such a denial of rights in an environment where such equal rights are already taken for granted is a very different question, and pointing to how some people in the past wrote essays reaching for genetics to justify the pre-existing millennia-old status quo of unequal rights as evidence that it would just doesn't look like anything other than paranoia to me. Anecdotally, but I've yet to see anyone who's sexist/racist enough to call for denial of rights to women/blacks who seem like they would have been egalitarian equal-rights-supporters but for their knowledge of HBD or similar scientific concepts. I'm sure some exist, but the evidence that such people are so numerous as to meaningfully affect political outcomes in terms of equal rights is something I'm rather skeptical of, and something I'd absolutely love to see actual good, rigorous scientific research done on, in order to better inform all of us with respect to the value of denying this science on ethical grounds.

On the one hand, it's true that people who enshrined differential treatment in law based on sex and ethnicity did not understand the genetic basis for the differences between groups, as legislation of this kind predated our modern understanding of genetics. On the other hand, they obviously had some kind of intuitive understanding of the psychological differences between men and women, or white people and black people, even if they didn't understand the mechanisms underpinning said differences. This results in a situation like that described by Joseph Henrich, where a proposed explanation for a phenomenon is factually wrong but nonetheless produces accurate and useful predictions. "Women tend to take a close interest in children for reasons of genetics and evolutionary psychology" is factually true; "women tend to take a close interest in children because God created them as a helpmeet for men" is factually false, and yet the latter explanation still produces useful predictions. If you were to ask a gender studies professor and an uneducated Catholic living in the sixteenth century which kinds of careers women would tend to pursue if there were no obstacles in their way, I'd hazard a guess that the latter would give you more accurate answers. Consider the "paradox" that more liberal and economically free nations tend to have more stratified sex ratios in STEM, childcare etc.: it's only a "paradox" if you accept the false premise that men and women are psychologically the same and want the same things, on average.

I don't buy the stock woke narrative that white males historically conspired to oppress women and people of colour out of sheer bloody-mindedness. People in the past didn't need Gregor Mendel to tell them that men and women tend to have innately different interests, temperaments and priorities: up untill about ten minutes ago, this was seen as so obvious as to hardly even be worth mentioning. (That's why I think woke efforts to bury journal articles which produce politically incorrect findings are both infuriating and futile: so many of these articles are just telling us what we already know. "Newsflash: across cultures, female children like playing with dolls while male children like playing with fire trucks, suggesting that sex differences are innate." Get out of town. Next you'll be telling me water is wet.) I don't think denying women the franchise was a morally good idea, but it was obviously a decision made on the back of lawmakers' intuitive understanding of the psychological differences between men and women, even if they didn't understand the mechanism that caused these differences. They didn't just do it out of spite.

This actually gets to why conservatism is often a good system without very good reasons to do something different. Evolutionary pressures would tend to select a tribe to grow if their beliefs produce positive results.

Tribe A: Men stay home with kids. Women get weapons and fight tribe B for the best agricultural land.

Tribe B: women take care of kids. Men fight rival tribe.

Which Gods tribe A and B pray to does not matter. Tribe B will kills the babysitting male tribe and turn their women into sex slaves.

Tribe B beliefs are now the beliefs of the now larger tribe B combined with tribe A.

Yes, cultural evolution in a nutshell.

The innate differences of men and women have been used to excuse systematic denial of women’s rights. Same for white vs. black.

The systematic denial of differences hasn't exactly been a godsend for equality, rights, or anti-racism/anti-sexism as defined by sane people instead of sign-flipped racists/sexists. Quite the opposite!

You have to deny that some races are smarter. Just always pick the pro-migration position.

Or more generally:

You have to deny reality. Just always pick the conservative position.

Now consider the Overton window, where (starting at the liberal end and moving to the most conservative [traditionalist-progressive]) in a universal suffrage democracy you have:

[The people who are more productive deserve to keep more of their better outcomes] (population x proportion on the high side of the bell curve) -> [some genders are more productive than others] (population x 0.5) -> [some races are more productive than others] (population x 0.1) -> [some sexualities are more productive than others] (from population x 0.01-0.001)

And since 'some sexualities are more productive than others' has had serious issues lately it makes sense that progressives are going to focus on the more defensible position.

(It's also why the LGB-T speedran the civil rights playbook; it worked for the two previous causes, why wouldn't it work for the third?)

The trads/progs, as different flavors of conservative, simply take as axiomatic what that answer is going to be (men/women, white/other, straight/other) because they are not comfortable with what being on the low side of that equation actually means, or less charitably are actively mining the market shortfall that [society as organization being axiomatically wrong about something] provides them and would have to do something harder if that resource collapsed, and that looks different as you travel up the window.

The trads/progs, as different flavors of conservative, ...

I am pretty consistently baffled by your insinuations on this point. Could you clarify what you mean? I'm familiar with the meme of conservatives as progressives going the speed limit, and I'm familiar with the idea that conservatives keep progressives' mistakes from being corrected, and so on. But you seem to be using these words in a very idiosyncratic way.

some sexualities are more productive than others' has had serious issues lately

I feel like I've missed something here.

I don’t think it’s a big leap to go from “some population groups run faster” to “some population groups do management/science better”.

That's why the term "neck-up creationism" was coined.

Some people accept that physical traits (including important ones like health and athleticism) are affected by genetics but reject the idea that cognitive traits are. That phrase points out the inconsistency.

Though the image of the author frowning and making notes as she browses racist jokes on Twitter brings me joy

"They keep asking me how I would feel if I hadn't eaten breakfast this morning...".

Thank you for bringing me back to this

💎

the text on the pic says "...breakfast yesterday"

The headline pic fell victim to abbreviation. The full text probably would be too clunky to fit, so the cut it up without realizing it makes no sense anymore. The tweet they reference in the headline is a bit lower on the page.

I encountered this on Twitter over the weekend, and, as should have been predictable to almost anyone, it resulted in the "ethically modified schematic reconstructions" themselves birthing new memes. My favorite is probably the article 13 compliant frog, but there are others too that made me laugh. Should be interesting to see how this develops.

On the paper at hand, it's hard to think of a more harsh condemnation of the authors and the journal that published it and possibly the entire field that found this behavior acceptable than this sort of "ethical modification" of memes in a purportedly scientific paper. If it were trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot, that would be one thing, but this is because a particular grid of pixels was deemed unethical to show other academics for the purpose of scientific research and discussion, due to the idea contents of that grid of pixels. It creates a complete abomination of the idea of scientific inquiry, which requires entertaining ideas and presenting facts as they are. I think the continuing self-discrediting of academia is likely to keep getting worse before it gets better, if ever. AIs performing automated research and producing automated papers gives me hope, but also, I think the same forces that created this abomination are likely to dominate those too. I just hope that automating scientific research and papers will become so cheap and accessible to the layman that it won't be possible to truly censor.

I just hope that automating scientific research and papers will become so cheap and accessible to the layman that it won't be possible to truly censor.

That's why they're getting ahead of it, and censoring AI itself.

I saw a note on Substack that compared it to a medical journal publishing an article about sexually transmitted diseases but only referring to them as "diseases affecting the naughty bits". It's fundamentally unserious behaviour.

diseases

I mean it's also less accurate and communicates less clearly too. There are plenty of non sexually transmitted diseases that affect the naughty bits too.

The original note was worded more clearly. I specifically mean a journal article which refused to use anatomical terms like "penis" and "vulva" and instead substituted childish euphemisms therefor.

As funny as that comparison is, the reality is certainly far worse than that. Because "ethically modifying" a meme by changing its pixels also fundamentally alters the meme in such a way as not to present the reader with an accurate depiction of the actual thing being purportedly studied, in a way that using nicer-sounding words doesn't. It'd be more like talking about genital herpes while presenting pictures of mosquito bites because pictures of genital herpes is icky, and mosquito bites kinda look similar.

grid of pixels

A bit reductive. Child porn is also just a grid of pixels.

That's just the motte of the previously-discussed bailey, though.

I would contend that that falls under the "trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot" where I outlined the exceptional cases where it could be reasonable to censor grids of pixels in scientific papers.

I would contend that that falls under the "trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot"

Which means you lose when "racist caricature" [equal to/implies] "photo of victim", like it's being treated here.

Nah, you win when they transparently make idiots out of themselves.

This is a social context, not a legal one. Rules-lawyering your way into an exception means that you're out of touch, not that you're protected by the rules.

This absolutely slaps.

Changing consumer habits could be here.

A lot of the originals were pretty sad excuses for comedy. There’s something to be said for slapping a fresh coat of irony on them. Maybe the next step is a Hollywood movie by a 20yo amateur.

On the other hand, I kept reading it as “ethnically modified,” which I suppose might have achieved the authors’ goals.

Also, I’m curious where the effective altruism crept in. You have a link to that one?

The full paper is in open access. Direct link to the PDF
Excerpt towards the end, page 22:

However, this contemporary shift extends the logic of Francis Galton, who conceived intelligence as hereditary capital optimisable through selective intervention (Aubert-Marson, 2009), into a twenty-first-century imaginary. Echoes of this logic reappear in transhumanist visions, optimisation-oriented strands of Effective Altruism, and broader cultural valorisations of cognitive rationality as a measure of social worth.

The point isn't to make you laugh, it is to focus attention on various chronic absurdities

Could the reconstructions have to do with copyright? Internet memes are a legal grey area copyright-wise. A proper academic journal would presumably want to avoid copyright infringement, even if the probability of an actual lawsuit is nil.

It'd be fair use regardless of the status of the original meme, as it's for academic purposes, though, right?

Maybe. My familiarity with copyright is mostly from editing Wikipedia, which shies away from fair use except in certain very narrowly defined cases, even though the entirety of Wikipedia could be construed as an educational project. But they might be doing that for ideological reasons (wanting everything to be free content), rather than legal liability.

Edit: For example, they compress images to basically a thumbnail to make them unusable for anything except illustrating an article. That's probably more to do with lawsuit paranoia than free content concerns.

Possibly, but it's unlikely that the journal in question wants to get a definitive answer from the judge dismissing the lawsuit.

Papers republish copyrighted/trademarked works like corporate logos, advertising copy, visual art, book exerpts, etc. all the time, and those are works with wealthy, highly litigious, easily identified owners. No publisher is going out on a limb reproducing an anonymously created meme that had been freely circulating online for years.

To think I've been looking at dangerous memes for years on the internet without appropriate PPE.

I skimmed the article and saw the [redacted] memes, but there were only a few. Is there a separate appendix, or even a list, somewhere that has all 70 memes that were considered?

They are supposedly shared with other priests researches upon personal request.

Incredible. Memes that are so dangerous that they cannot be shared with anyone who might wish to review the data used to generate the paper's conclusions unless the requester is a member of the priesthood. Ignoring, of course, that these memes circulate freely on the internet.

The SCP memetic hazard comparison gets more apt at every turn. Looking forward to academics dosing themselves with amnesia gas after browsing /pol/. Or forcing inmates to shitpost and then killing them as a safety precaution.

Re "We need him for the football team", I would like to state at this time that the same phenomenon is not unheard of with white perpetrators.

I saw an "ethically sourced" version of the "understanding per capita" meme too, as I was scrolling by, but I sadly didn't save it.

Yeah but the same person who is 'we need him for the football team' with Mtumbo Mtumbo likely doesn't have the same sentiment for Dale Daleson III who used a no-no word once and wore a red hat. I'm big into the MMA fandom and it's kinda hysterical how often fanbases take issues with 'US citizen fighter is a Republican' whilst getting behind overseas fighters who realistically have social views far to the right of Republicans. I get on fine with Dagestanis I've met and trained with, but like the social views of a Khabib Nurmagomedov are likely going to be miles outside of the current overton window of Western discourse. They're generally polite and good guys in a training room, but I've had conversations with some where they've prettymuch said, without qualms, that homosexuals should be killed and I think very few MAGAs are at that point on the continuum,

It's-a mea culpa.

Last week there was some discussion of Rupert Lowe's report on Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK. I accepted the already infamous estimate of 250k victims uncritically, assuming that this number included all victims in the period 1970-2018. But according to this article, the report actually claims that the figure of 250k victims only includes those in the period 2000-18. The linked article tries to come up with a more accurate estimate of the total number of victims.

I was wrong to accept that specific claim at face value, and wrong to disagree with people who were suspicious of it. I think the real figure might be an order of magnitude lower – still a national outrage, mind you, and a far greater scandal than the clerical abuse scandals of the 2000s.

Well, good on you, I guess. The Lowe report (and Lord Pearson’s initial bluster) come out looking miserably untrustworthy.

I can’t say I expected much from a substack titled “heretical insights,” but I was pleasantly surprised.

As an aside: I don’t think the specific numbers matter. The Catholic scandals took off because they involved positions of trust. The numbers were smaller but closer to home. A failure of utilitarianism, to be sure.

And the literal police facilitating rape isn’t a failure of trust?

Oh, it totally is. But one that’s less personal.

The Lowe report (and Lord Pearson’s initial bluster) come out looking miserably untrustworthy

Why untrustworthy? I thought the entire reason the figure was controversial, was that they were open about arriving at the number through a naive extrapolation.

Unless I’m misreading this, the substack author had to reconstruct a method, since Pearson never explained his numbers publicly.

He was quoted in the report, which again didn’t lay out its calculation.

What do you mean?

The scale of the rape gang phenomenon is endemic across the entirety of Britain. The 250,000 figure originates directly from a statement in the House of Lords by Lord Pearson of Rannoch on 14 May, 2019:

“Do the Government accept that if we extrapolate nationally the Jay report on Rotherham and other reports from Telford and Oxford, there appear to have been upwards of 250,000 young white girls raped in this century, very largely by Muslim men, usually several times a day for years?”

This is the verbatim quote of the report quoting Pearson. How do you make it clearer that they took the Rotheram, Telford, and Oxford numbers and extrapolated them nationwide?

EDIT: I can concede they shouldn't use such a strong / high-certainty language in the executive summary:

The scale of the crimes committed is staggering. It has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma.

But I'm not seeing where the detective work to reconstruct the method, and therefore the untrustworthiness, is supposed to come in.

Okay, we’ve been looking at the same quote. I agree that there was no ambiguity about him doing an extrapolation. I think the article was clear that Pearson took the most extreme assumption whenever possible. Not including any of those assumptions means that his original statement was pretty untrustworthy.

Pearson took the most extreme assumption whenever possible

Nitpick: I don't think extrapolating from 3 known points is the most extreme assumption possible - that should be reserved for assuming that some / most other places had an even higher rate of abuse than Rotheram.

Not including any of those assumptions means that his original statement was pretty untrustworthy.

Well, as long as we're talking about the report, I'd say it criticizeable, but not untrustworthy. They didn't hide the method 5 links deep from an obscure note in the references. The quote is in the second hit when you CTRL+F for "250".

The Catholic scandals took off because they involved positions of trust.

See, I think it's more to do with 1. hypocrisy ("these people claim to be arbiters of morality but look at how they actually behave") and 2. popular anti-Christian sentiment.

People who love to complain about the clerical abuse scandal never seem interested in talking about, e.g., the higher prevalence of such abuse in public schools, despite it being another example of abuse of positions of trust. That's just not what's interesting.

I'd also add that there's an element of identity. There's a big difference in street pimps taking advantage of lost poor juvenile delinquents, often with absent or bad parents, vs "Good Kids" whose parents are pious enough to get them to church and make them altar boys. The horror of the latter is significantly larger publicly, even if people won't acknowledge it.

Similar to how school shootings are significantly more horrifying than gang related shootings, even if the gang related shootings kill more kids.

And also because clerical abuse was so homosexual. Of course for Catholicism this goes way back; some monasteries wouldn't accept young, bare-chinned men as their twinkiness was too irresistible for some of the older monks. Laypeople unfortunately were never taught just how gay their spiritual forebears were.

The Catholic scandals took off in places that did not have popular anti-Christian sentiment. It was actually the proximal cause of anti-Christian sentiment in Ireland, starting when Ireland was still religious(I would argue that Irish collapse in religiosity was overdetermined, but it was still the proximal cause).

The visceral horror of it was that it was happening to kids from good families, who were doing nothing wrong. The public doesn't care very much about homeless prostitutes, never has, never will. Trying to draw attention to their plight(and it is a plight, this is not a fun life), just makes people want to get rid of them. On the other hand the abuse victims came from families that did everything right and were betrayed.

With the Church, the main thing horrifying people was not the crimes (though there was likely a higher rate of sex offenses than for the general population), but the cover-up.

If the RCC had dealt with sex offenders by sending them to some monastery on some desolate island with no kids around for 200 nautical miles, then that would have pissed off people a lot less.

Instead, the main goal was generally to keep the reputation of the church intact. If people complained, perps were given new parishes where they could continue to victimize minors.

The fixation on the 250,000 is a distraction tactic. The conclusion of the article says that there were "only" 13,500 rapes of underage girls over a nearly 20 year period by foreigners who were apparently often motivated by religious and ethnic hatred; even so, that is still absolutely disgusting and horrifying. The article also says that grooming gangs are "extremely rare" because um ackchually lot of abuse doesn't actually involve "human trafficking" or <insert NGOspeak terminology here> which are apparently necessary prerequisites to taking these massive crimes seriously. The left wants to engage in dishonest nitpicking about terminology and numbers so that attention is diverted towards the credibility of the report writers and pedantic arguments over technical definitions, while the right wants to point at the child rapes and shout about how the exact facts don't matter, look how awful all of this is! It's inverse holocaust revisionism: "Actually it was only 1 million Jews killed and technically they weren't gassed and why were there swimming pools and hospitals in the camps and and and..." while the other side is pointing and screaming at the large piles of corpses.

I don't think there's really any dialogue to be had about this, it's just another cobblestone on the road towards civil conflict.

EDIT: Fixed typos and terrible writing

13,000 victims over the course of several decades is a national outrage, and revolutions have started over less. But it's important to get our facts straight. If there was no good reason to believe the 250k figure was accurate, Lowe should not have included it in his report.

As a fellow Mottizen, I agree with you, but the way this correction will be used by most normies is "the number is fake and can be dismissed (and by association, so can everything else in the report)." We are all high decoupling autists here but most people can't hold "it was not nearly as bad as they say, but also it's an absolute outrage and something must be done" in their head at the same time.

Yeah. I wish Lowe had gotten it right the first time, but the cat's out of the bag now. Strategically, I think anti-immigration activists would be better off emphasising that there were thousands of victims and that the police knew about it but sat on their hands, but avoid mentioning the specific number of victims the report claims if they can help it.

My charitable interpretation is that the 250,000 might have been a Trumpian overstatement designed to get the establishment media to issue a still-damning correction (actually it was "only" 25,000!) which would fail to deflate the anger and makes the media look out-of-touch. But that depends on the media fumbling the ball.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with Rupert Lowe to know if this kind of 4-D chess would occur to him.

I assume the research, compilation, and release of the report was handled by party strategists rather than Lowe personally, but I'm also not sure how much he was involved. It was release right before the Makerfield by-election so that suggests at least some strategic thinking.

I think the other poster was taking the piss about the misspelling of Lowe’s name.

The methodology of the Lowe inquiry was to believe victims the way Democrats believed Christine Blasely Ford or the UN believes Hamas atrocity propaganda. I don't think part of that process includes thinking about whether numbers are accurate or not. Most of the things said are consistent with what we know was going on from other sources, but at least one of the allegations is obviously false (there is a trained rape dog on page 97 - and in fact "Kate"'s entire account is implausible - she also claims that the first time she was raped, the rapists jumped her in the street and gang-raped her on the spot, in public - which as well as its inherent implausibility is not the MO of a grooming gang).

The 250,000 has been the standard estimate on the British right, but it comes from a Reform peer making a guess in order to ask a Parliamentary question - basically "I think there were 250,000 - if you have a lower estimate please share it". I would be very surprised if there is any complexity beyond that.

It goes without saying that my attention was drawn to this alleged rape dog and the one in an Israeli prison by very different social media posters, and that the number of non-Motteposters who called out the obvious falsity of both allegations is likely to be zero. Most people are sane enough not to give a sh*t about politics, but the vast majority of the ones who do will believe in the rape dog when it is politically convenient for their side.

The 250,000 has been the standard estimate on the British right, but it comes from a Reform peer making a guess in order to ask a Parliamentary question - basically "I think there were 250,000 - if you have a lower estimate please share it"

Weren't there more thorough reports from Rotheram, Telford, and Oxford, with actual numbers, that got extrapolated nationally to reach 250K? It's still flawed methodology, but it's not "basically I think there were 250,000".

A rape dog in the context of a rape gang seems less absurd compared to a rape dog in the context of a military agency.

My gut feeling would be the obvious - that a rape dog in an organisation with a tradition of dog training is less absurd than a rape dog in an organisation which eschews dogs ownership for religious reasons.

That said, the point is that both are about as likely as the Motte endorsing AOC in the 2028 Presidential election.

More comments

It doesn’t matter. Maybe I am a cynic or narcissistic but we have to be honest that most people are NOT as smart as people here. There are areas where you need to be intellectually honest - I guess with high IQ elites etc trying to honestly debate things and then report them to the masses.

To me mass migration is the biggest risks to Human Civilization. Dark ages likely occur if we get this wrong. The point of 250k is it emphasizes the magnitude of the issue to the masses which is true.

I like that fact that India has extremely high IQ people but IQ testing seems to indicate low IQ averages. My instincts tells me that science just doesn’t happen in those type of societies. There are probably as money Vivek types in India as the western world has but some kind of agglomeration effect can’t occur in this society. If that happens to America then science dies is my guess.

And then maybe in 1000 years so very smart group develops somewhere. They have a lot of bloodlust and tribe by tribe they expand and kill the natives until they start to rebuild industrial society again. That’s my downside case for mass migration.

I think the real figure might be an order of magnitude lower

Ah, so only about 6 times worse than the total number of victims in the entire history of the KKK. I guess that means it should just be ignored, and the UK government should keep right on covering it up, using the criminal justice system to suppress discussion and objection, arresting parents who complain, feeding escaped girls right back into the hands of their abusers, and smiling benignly while police officers participate in the gang rapes.

Even if that number is overshot by an order of magnitude, there is no curse in Elvish, Entish or the tongues of Men for this treachery. The last lynching style murder in the US we executed 2/3s of the perpetrators and gave the only one who showed remorse a mere life sentence. The British should extrapolate that number out.

I think this article makes a big mistake by trying to make a distinction between victims who were "actually raped" versus just other victims of exploitation. We have a bit of hyperbole and motte and bailey, but i think it's totally reasonable to read the claims of the original report as claiming that there were approx 250k victims of rape gangs overall, and not specifically that they all met the legal definition of rape. To me this seems like a massive nitpick.

The relevant issue is that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape your daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion". There is no way back from here.

This is false. Fundamental to how and why the Pakistani rape gangs were allowed to operate was that the girls were chavettes at a time when statutory rape of chavettes was effectively decriminalised. About half the girls whose accounts form the first half of Rupert Lowe's report had already been sexually assaulted by male relatives, "stepfathers" or children's home staff before the Pakistani rape gangs got to them, with the perps being significantly less likely to face justice than the Pakistani gangs were.

If you are a middle-class married father in an intact family, your daughter was mostly safe.

This is false.

That's right. While it is true that that there are significant number of your Pakistani neighbors who could call up some friends to gang rape someone's daughter and their extended clan network will overlook it while the police ignore it to preserve "community cohesion", your daughter would be safe. Mostly.

Agreed. Morally and legally, there is no difference between "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls and one of them might have been your daughter" and "the authorities aided and abetted the gang rape of x thousand girls who were the kind of girls everyone considered rapebait anyway". The guilty parties should be drummed out of public life (they mostly have been) and, if they committed crimes, prosecuted. (They mostly didn't, although the Lowe report implies that some individual cops accepted bribes). But if you are asking the question "why is the average Brit not outraged by this?", which most Motteposters posting about this issue are, that is a question about politics.

Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news, the Pakistani grooming gang scandal has had less political legs than the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association, the Afghan rapefugee scandals in various Continental European countries, or even a mostly-fake scandal like the US campus rape crisis. And the reason for that is precisely that your daughter is safe if you are someone who matters.

Despite the best efforts of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk etc to keep milking what is now very old news

You are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The reason this news is still relevant / milkable is that precisely zip has been done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Where are the new migration guidelines? Where is the MacPherson report? Where is the anti-anti-racist training for the police?

The closest I’ve heard of it is some white paper that Mahmood is supposedly shopping about.

And the reason for that is precisely that your daughter is safe if you are someone who matters.

Everyone has heard of "damning with faint praise". I'm not sure what to call this. "Defense by appeal to damnation?"

If the defense of the British establishment is just "Who cares, they were poor?" then said establishment can kindly shut the fuck up forever on all other moral matters. They have no right to opine about anyone or anything else. Their every utterance will be dismissed with a Soviet-style "And have you stopped raping the poor girls?"

Forget "drummed out of public life", such an establishment would deserve to be violently purged. Genuinely worse than the history of racism in the US, and casually, without a shred of decency, grace, or remorse. More deserving of anti-Apartheid levels of hostility and scorn from the decent peoples of the West than Rhodesia and South Africa.

I don't think it's a moral/ethical defense, but rather a sort of realpolitik analysis of why things are happening the way they are. Of course, once you enter that realm, then it follows that if enough anti-rape-gang Brits decide to implement what you say is deserved, there's no grounds by which to condemn them other than by gaining enough power to stop them. Which usually leads to bad results for everyone all around.

I don't think it's a moral/ethical defense, but rather a sort of realpolitik analysis of why things are happening the way they are.

Sure ,but there are implications that follow from that, such as the total loss of moral standing from the people being so analyzed.

Maybe it's my latent American Millennial Progressive bleeding through, but imagine this. Imagine that Latino gangs were doing this to black girls. Imagine that over the last 25 years, they had kidnapped, drugged, gang raped, and sex trafficked somewhere between 125,000 and 1.25 million underage black girls. Imagine if the defacto policy of the US government was to suppress any reporting, prosecute members of the community who spoke out, and literally gave escaped sex slaves back to the cartels responsible. Imagine if they blithely dismissed any calls for action, while reacting with utter fury and the full force of the state against any black parent who tried to protect his daughter. Imagine if, when pressed, the retreated to "Well, they're just ni**gers. You know how those girls are. Sluts were probably asking for it. What do you want us to do about it? What about the taco trucks and MLB players?"

I've lived through two generations of guilt and shame and atonement for vastly lesser offenses. The British establishment and middle classes come out of this looking like inhuman monsters.

More comments

If the defense of the British establishment

It isn't a defence of the British establishment, it's an explanation for the passivity of the average middle-class Brit. Compare the public and political response to the grooming gangs to the equivalent response to the much lower number of second-generation Pakistani immigrants who blew themselves up on public transport around 2005 - that was a case where it could be you or your child.

The only possible defence of the British establishment is that it may have learned the lessons since the scandal first broke around 2010, one retirement at a time. Starmer, in particular, was one of the people involved in breaking the scandal (as Director of Public Prosecutions when the first batch of gang members were prosecuted) rather than in covering it up. Andy Burnham as metro mayor commissioned a metro-wide inquiry into grooming gangs on his turf (Rochdale and Oldham were the medium-sized ones, there were also some small ones) and was responsible for Greater Manchester being one of the only three police forces to consistently report ethnicity of criminal suspects, according to the 2025 audit carried out by Louise Casey.

Kier Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, let 13,000 suspected rape gang members and pedophiles off with warning letters.

Andy Burnham appears to believe that the problem has already been fixed because they produced a report from an inquiry.

More comments

But the UK elite love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household. This is a key part of the identity of the progressive elite in the Anglosphere. The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community. The math (maths?) on this was that their reputation would be more harmed by representing White poor than by representing the minority community, because its higher status to be worldly and pro-diversity than pro-White. But it’s the same group of people who promote welfare benefits and spots for the poor at Oxford who were unwilling to go against the minority block, no?

The problem with the grooming gang seems to be instead that, for the Anglo to care about the White poor, they had to go against the minority community.

I agree that this is true, but (to my knowledge, I’m not British) there’s an additional element of class at play in Britain. It’s obviously true that western elites writ large “love to signal how much they care about minorities and the poor outside their household” but in the UK this attitude is standing on the back of a long history of especially stark class differences which persist to this day, such that the poor are not merely “the poor” but fully other, a separate and inferior culture. Today they deserve pity and perhaps charity but are still broadly contemptible. This differentiates the native lower-class from poor immigrants, who are now seen as Diverse and Enriching to the culture, where the native poor are seen as the same drag on the culture they’ve been seen as for centuries.

I suspect this cultural history is the secret sauce for how this problem became so much more pronounced in Britain than anywhere else: other countries have problems with migrant crime, including sexual violence, but not with mass-scale organized rape gangs.

My intuition is that if it were the White poor who were raping the Pakistanis, it would be an instant cause célèbre among the upper classes who would demand the most severe punishments against those responsible, just as they do for racial incidents. It’s hard for me to imagine the British covering up the crimes of Whites against minorities, and it actually seems they try to do the opposite. So it’s not actually a class issue at all, because the Pakistanis are not in their class, yet would be a sympathetic victim group. It’s more like the intricate social class dynamic of the UK has been applied onto ranking a hierarchy of sympathy, where minorities are simply higher on the ranking of Innate Value. Just as in America, for many decades you couldn’t criticize Blacks for being violent, they had to be a sympathetic and you needed to make excuses.

More comments

I don't understand how this add-on makes the statement you're replying to false. Rape gangs chose vulnerable targets who didn't have much parental oversight - kinda obvious that those targets would be mainly working class and from dysfunctional households.

Why does the fact that many of these girls had previously been abused conflict with or deny the claim that much of the scale, perseverance and overall modus operandi these rape gangs were operating under very obviously were tied to the tribalism and ethno-religious chauvinism of the Pakistani, specifically Miripuri, diaspora?

The fact is that countless WOMEN within these communities were fully aware of what their male kinsmen were up to, but condoned it due to - in their own words - the victimized girls being outside of their community and faith. The mental tradeoff these diasporas operate under is very simple - "would sending a member of my family/clan to prison be better than a faithless outsider experiencing suffering at their hand? It would not, therefore I won't take action against it." This is how these rape gangs are allowed to operate with impunity - since quasi-everyone in the diaspora has some knowledge or involvement in it, combatting it by means of law enforcement would effectively engender taking legal action against the vast majority of the entire localized diaspora, which police nor politics won't do for obvious reasons. It's the exact same issue Europe has been having with gypsies for decades - trying to combat their criminality essentially means criminalising the entire community since the vast majority of them are criminals, accessories to the crime, or at the very least highly aware, yet unbothered by it.

Exactly. Debooonkers of this number are also likely ones who didn't have any issue with the '1/3 males in college will rape somebody' study that has been cited for a decade+ now or other insane flourishes of the #metoo era.

The number is probably overblown but the thing that annoys me is that people trying to erode the number are being enthusiastically platformed whilst completely absurdities like Ro Khanna claiming that DOGE has killed 4.5 million children (up from 500k a few months ago) get essentially no critical pushback despite being even more insane and frivolous. I've had enough random stuff that could be debunked (or atleast determined to be hugely exaggerated) with about 30 seconds of thinking shoved down my throat in recent years that it's kinda funny to see all these people suddenly own calculators and rational thinking hats.

Sore wa sore, kore wa kore. More cynically, it's because arguments are soldiers. It supports a political point they want to use to hurt their outgroup. When the numbers look bad, they wave it off because they want to disempower the soldiers.

This is no different from the ref being totally unfair when he rules against the sports team you support, and being totally unbiased and objective when he rules against the opposing sports team. Same animus.

Yep.

Also the fact that people are horrible at judging scope, which the rationalists also point out.

25,000 vs. 250,000 are literally a whole order of magnitude different in terms of the 'scale' of an atrocity. You would desperately HOPE that the scale is closer to the former than the latter!

But I bet the average person isn't envisioning the 225,000 person difference that entails, both just register as "a huge number of young girls." But the 250,000 number is clearly 'bigger' and thus a more useful bludgeon, so from a pure rhetorical standpoint OF COURSE you're grabbing onto that if you can justify it at all.

For my part, the reason that number triggered skepticism is it implies truly prolific activity by the gangs in question. Going with what seems like to me an absurd estimate, if there were 1,000 distinct 'grooming gangs' over the period examined, each one would need to rack up 250 victims to reach that figure. That's a high enough number to involve actual logistical challenges. Even if you invert it, call it 2,500 grooming gangs, that's 100 victims each.

The ratios just don't make sense to me.

It's slightly easier to accept that maybe there were 250,000 individual victims of sexual assault by migrants, mostly in a decentralized "I was accosted by a random guy on the street" sort of way, rather than all of them experiencing sustained abuse by legible groups.

Nevertheless, there's sufficient, indeed ample evidence that organized rings exist so the scale can surely be in the low 1000's to mid 10,000's if we're looking at a period of almost 20 years.

If one guy (Epstein) with a little help could 'traffic' dozens of girls over the same period, definitely feasible that multiple gangs could pull it off too.

Anyway, at this point I'm less upset over whether the 250,000 number is true and accurate or not... and more by the fact the UK government cannot actually confirm or refute it because they've been asleep at the wheel for so long the necessary data just wasn't collected???

if there were 1,000 distinct 'grooming gangs' over the period exained, each one would need to rack up 250 victims to reach that figure

The Rotherham and Telford gangs both had well over 1,000 victims. If every grooming gang was that prolific, you get to 250,000 easily. But they weren't. The third largest gang was Oxford, with about 300 victims. Rochdale and Oldham were in the 100-300 range, and none of the other individual town-level gangs that got busted was over 100.

Like most criminal activity, this looks like a power-law type problem, not a Gaussian-type problem.

Yeah, almost certainly had a few that got away with war-crime levels of it, and most that got a few girls total.

So the gut-wrenching calculation is how many girls did these gangs tend to cycle through over how long a time period.

Yeah if you gave maximal credence to incidences of sexual assault and dropped the thresholds to leering and verbal harassment it might be plausible. Especially when that kind of statistical inflation tends to be the norm in sexual abuse data advanced by those on the Left

I don’t think the 250,000 figure is far-fetched at all.

I think most people’s math is wrong. Many victims describe being raped by hundreds of men in relatively small geographic areas. There are communities where a very large proportion of Mirpuri men of all ages, from their mid teens to their sixties and seventies, first and second generation, may have been involved. There is documented evidence of this happening as far back as the 1950s, when there were just a few thousand (at most) Mirpuris in the entire UK. There are communities where documented evidence across enquiries suggests that the majority of girls in some poor estates or especially in care homes were abused. There are countless anecdotal pieces of evidence from hundreds of small towns, cities, villages across the UK - even some where the Pakistani population was less than 2-3% for much of the period, like Telford - where men and women will say “everybody knew” that there were teenage girls involved in this kind of purported prostitution work, people gossiped at schools, the kids all knew some girls who were involved, who recruited others.

Lastly, very very few women have come forward about being victims. Many are now adults, mothers, grandmothers in some cases, with husbands and families who may have no idea about the abuse they’ve suffered. What mother would want to subject her own children to bullying at school calling their mother a [slur] whore or whatever because she spoke publicly about her abuse. Many survivors just want to forget it. I don’t know many northerners closely but I’ve spoken to some - not from any of the infamous places for this - who say everybody knew it was happening when they were kids. And there’s almost no compensation for victims - if you were assaulted by a Weinstein or Al Fayed type, you can come forward and take legal action for millions (of course you can remain anonymous in some cases, but publicity can help there). If you were repeatedly raped by poor immigrant taxi drivers and kebab store owners, you’re not getting anything.

The math, when you consider this happened in pretty much every town and city in England for 40-60 years (in large volumes until 10 years ago, and in some cases still to this day), a country of 70 million people, easily supports a total victim count of 250,000 or indeed much much more.

Right, but as I said in the OP, according to the report itself, the 250k figure is not the estimate of the total number of victims since the beginning of mass immigration to the UK, but rather the number of victims just in the period 2000-18. I could buy a quarter of a million victims over the course of seven decades. A quarter million over the course of less than two decades is significantly harder to swallow.

250,000/18 = 13,888 victims a year.

Ignoring the report and just asking about the number at face value: why do your priors tell you that ~14,000 victims of organized sexual crime a year in a population of 70mil is so unbelievable?

One issue here for me is that there's likely a lot of repeat victims. I could easily believe that there were 14K victimizations of underage girls by organized Muslim rape gangs in the UK each year. But for there to be, on average, an additional 14K new such victims each year, given that many of these girls seem to have been raped dozens or even hundreds of times, it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs. Which is possible, but also, it's sufficiently high that I'd want to see the evidence and the math. Which are lacking. So the number is believable, but not credible.

it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs.

Again, why? Consider an abused spouse who is forced into sex by her husband many times a week - she might be raped 500 times in a year. That’s one person.

Girls trafficked or coerced into sexual slavery / prostitution are often raped thousands of times per year. But some may only have been raped a handful of times before their parents physically stopped them from going out, they moved away, or they avoided their abusers themselves directly. It wasn’t like they were being chained up most of the time, they were plied with drugs and alcohol.

So the 250,000 would include women who, aged 13 or 14, were invited to a room about a kebab place or a bodega, essentially, given vodka / weed / coke, and then raped while high/drunk/unconscious and who then never went back, as well as cases where girls were trafficked to hundreds of men.

I'm sure there's a range between 1x and 100,000x for any given victim, and the distribution of how many in each bucket in between is the real question. I honestly don't know if anyone has good data on what that distribution would be, since the people who have the tools and purportedly the societal responsibility to get the data required to model this sort of stuff accurately have pretty clearly intentionally avoided collecting the data. I'm just guessing, given how brazen these gangs seemed to have been, and the rather enormous numbers coming out in a number of anecdotal cases, roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude per victim as a mean seems reasonable. Maybe I'm wrong.

According to Wikipedia, in the year 2000 the UK's population was 59 million and 92% white. 20% of the population was 15 or younger, of which 49% was female. That gives us a population of 5.3 million girls. If 14,000 of them were sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs every year, that would mean a rate of 261/100k.

How does that compare with other common things people experience as children? This study (table 2) provides estimates of the rates of hospital admission for children aged 0-15 in the UK, and the reason for the admission. If we assume that the rates of hospital admission are roughly equal across every sub-group within that cohort (i.e. if the rate at which teenage girls are hospitalised is roughly equal to the rate at which children in general are hospitalised), then the 250k figure implies that a white British girl was more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than she was to be:

  • Hospitalised for blood disease (255/100k)
  • Hospitalised for circulatory disease (110/100k)
  • Hospitalised for mental illness (121/100k)
  • Hospitalised for eye disease (183/100k)

But even this is too generous, because I very much doubt the Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting one-year-old baby girls, and as so much coverage of the scandal has gone to great lengths to point out, one reason the police turned a blind eye for so long was because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. ChatGPT estimates that, in the year 2000, the population of white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds was probably about a million, which implies that the rate of sexual exploitation was 1,383/100k. This implies that a white working-class teenage girl was

  • 4 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a grooming gang than to be hospitalised for a skin condition
  • 8 times more likely than to be hospitalised for eye disease
  • 11 times more likely than to be hospitalised for mental illness
  • 13 times more likely than to be hospitalised for circulatory disease

Of course, we're all well aware that extremely long appointment waiting lists are the norm rather than the exception in the UK, so maybe using hospital admissions as a sense-check is really just a big indictment of the NHS. So let's come at it from a different angle.

The big problem with using crime statistics as an intuition pump is that this is a scandal about police officers sitting on their hands, meaning statistics collected during the period are inherently unreliable. So rather than using British crime stats, I'll use crime stats from Ireland, which is similar to the UK in many respects aside from (until recently) having a much higher percentage of native-born people, making it a natural control. At the beginning of the period under discussion, it had a very similar intentional homicide rate to the UK (~1/100k for Ireland vs. 1.5/100k for the UK), and intentional homicide rate is generally considered a useful proxy for the crime rate in general.

In 2005, Ireland reported 119 "defilements of a boy or girl less than 17 years old"; in 2008, 348; in 2009, 377. Per capita, that means 10 defilements/100k in 2005, 29/100k in 2008 and 31/100k in 2009.

I can imagine that the UK's large Pakistani population might mean that a working-class teenaged girl faces an elevated risk of sexual assault or exploitation compared to Ireland. But the 250k figure requires me to believe that, in 2005, a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK was 138 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish child was to be sexually exploited by anyone. I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.

I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.

How does it compare to Pakistan? Is there any reason to think we have reliable statistics?

Well, I certainly wouldn't trust any statistics published by public bodies in Pakistan. I'm honestly not even sure how I'd begin answering the question of how common child sexual abuse is in Pakistan, only that I'm sure it must be an order of magnitude higher than just about any country in western Europe.

Yeah, pretty much. If the higher numbers are accurate, I would expect it's similar to the mass social services fraud happening in the US. Import culture with massively higher predilection for anti-social behavior -> actively hamper normal enforcement methods for culture war reasons -> imported culture realizes and spreads how easy it is to get away with it -> massively higher predilection evolves into staggeringly higher offense rate.

Yes, I imagine this is what happened. For the sake of clarity, I'm not denying that grooming gangs were a big problem and that they were almost exclusively Pakistani men almost exclusively targeting white girls. I can believe that the rate at which these gangs targeted girls was comparable to the equivalent rate in Pakistan, or even higher (I've heard a theory that Pakistani men don't even see raping an infidel as a crime compared to raping one of their co-religionists, especially if the infidel girl is a "whore" i.e. doesn't wear a hijab). But I have to admit, I have a hard time believing that, in every year between 2000-18, 1 out of every 71 white working-class girls was sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang. That figure strikes me as impossibly high.

Also part of the issue with using Pakistan statistics is that there's a different culture of punishment and protection of women. UK women were likely in a bit of a quokka situation when exposed to essentially tribal attitudes directly

UK women were likely in a bit of a quokka situation

You can believe that. I don't.

The moral hazard [at least, from the viewpoint of the relevant actors, that being the middle-class English woman] arises from those girls being sexual competition, and it's good for the sociopolitical power of the median English woman if their ability to perform that function is compromised. The fact that it allows them to be turbo-Xist is just icing on the cake.

I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.

1383/100k vs 10/100k isn't based on comparing like-for-like, though. AFAICT, that report doesn't list it based on working-class grouping. And if we were to take an average of the 3 numbers you calculated instead of picking the lowest one (as the 1383 count is an average over multiple years, it's quite possible that it varied from 600/100k to 1800/100k in any given year, if the range was anything similar to Ireland), then it'd be about 60x.

Is 60x believable? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course) and would barely blink even if it were 1000x, because humanity is truly diverse. But if you find 100x unbelievable, perhaps 60x is unbelievable as well.

I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course)

This is a valid point. For the sake of argument, let's say that for each year in Ireland, 82.5% of the victims of defilement were girls under the age of 17. That would imply that the per capita rates for Irish girls <17 was 18/100k in 2005, 48/100k in 2008 and 51/100k in 2009, for an average of 39/100k across the entire period. That would shorten the odds substantially, implying that a white working-class teenaged girl in the UK is 35 times more likely to be sexually exploited by a Pakistani grooming gang than an Irish girl under the age of 18 is to be defiled by anyone.

But I have to admit: I still have a hard time believing that the UK's rate of sex crimes is >=30 times higher than Ireland's. If you told me it was double, I'd have no trouble believing that. 5 times? No question. 10 times? Well within the realm of possibility. But 30 times or more? That strains credibility.

And bear in mind: 1,383/100k isn't the rate at which white working-class teenaged girls get sexually exploited by anyone, but by Pakistani grooming gangs specifically. If we assume that most defilements in Ireland in the period were committed by co-ethnics (e.g. (extended) family members, teachers, Catholic priests etc.), then if the intra-ethnic rate of sexual exploitation of children is broadly similar across Ireland and the UK, white working-class teenaged girls in Briton would have had to contend with this risk in addition to their risk of sexual exploitation by Pakistani grooming gangs. So if the 250k figure is correct, that implies that the difference between the two countries is significantly higher than 35x.

I don't think you should assume that the two victim sets aren't at least partially coinciding, though that's kind of irrelevant here.

Fair point.

Why is 14,000 new victims per year unbelievable? There are say 8 million people aged 10-18, 4 million of them girls, at any given time. Through the period a much higher total number of girls passed through that age bracket. Through the period 2000-2018 probably 80% on average were indigenous.

The grooming gangs are best described as a cultural practice rather than a traditional form of organized crime, like the mob (which while an ethnic gang or group of gangs operated at least in some cases under a classic hierarchical structure). Obviously they engaged in other criminality in many cases, were tied to drug and human trafficking etc, but this wasn’t a ‘cartel’ or a ‘pimp’ with thousands of trafficked ‘employees’. These were local phenomena, just spread across the country. There was limited top down organization.

The UK is a pretty populous country. 15,000 girls a year out of 4+ million being involved in group based child sexual abuse like this is a tragedy and an outrage, but the numbers are not unbelievable.

As I pointed out in another comment, I don't think anyone's claiming that Pakistani grooming gangs were targeting newborns or toddlers for exploitation, and everyone has been keen to highlight that one reason the police looked the other way is because the victims were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds. If we limit our population to white girls aged 10-15 from working-class backgrounds, it shrinks to about 1 million as of the year 2000. 1.4% of those getting sexually exploited by Pakistani grooming gangs strikes me as staggeringly high.

I don’t know, I disagree that it seems staggeringly high. These are largely poor people who the ruling class basically never sees or cares about living in largely forgotten towns and cities outside of the wealthy southeast (where almost anyone with any influence, power or wealth in this country lives). Promiscuity is very common among the underclass including underclass girls, which is part of why so many were dismissed as prostitutes. I also think the nightlife dynamics are relevant here, even in many of these places where Mirpuris were only 2-4% of the population, they controlled and control large aspects of the nightlife economy including running convenience stores that sold alcohol, almost all taxis and later Ubers (before the Boriswave at least) late night food places etc. It’s not like they were equally represented across professions which also affects access to eg drunk girls.

1.4%? Yeah, a much larger proportion of women have been sexually victimized than that, especially among the poor,, and while a lot of that is domestic, 1.4% for organized or group based grooming abuse seems….possible? Police stats aren’t relevant here - even most middle class women who trust the police don’t report sexual violence. These girls definitely wouldn’t have. Instead you need to look at surveys of sexual victimization that suggest a large number of women are victims of sexual violence during their lifetimes, much of which will happen at a younger age, and which will happen disproportionately to the poor and underclass.

I still think this kind of extrapolation is unreasonable. It stands to reason that the gang we heard of was especially large-scale to have made it public. Or had especially bad OpSec. Similar organizations are likely to be much smaller, to have escaped notice so far. Just assuming that gangs like that of Rotherham, in type and scale, exist country-wide even in the absence of evidence strikes me as epistemiologically shoddy.

And I also still think anyone involved should have been lynched or swiftly executed. Doesn't need to be 250k; the Britons should have been drawing and quartering people from 1 upwards.

It was semi-public, and dozens of gangs were publicly tried and are still being tried. There were people (and not just the far right) low key talking about this for many decades. It was a perennial discussion on reactionary forums but also in a lot of social care and police circles; it was brought up in the mainstream conservative press occasionally and sheepishly by opinion columnists, heavily edited. It made the news a few times, just devoid of critical context and scale. It wasn’t a complete secret, it just wasn’t a scandal until in 2014 there was a lot of reporting and a Labour MP around Rotherham started talking about it publicly with parliamentary privilege after a report was published, which was itself because one guy at The Times had doggedly pursued it for several years in a corner of the mainstream press.

I find the substack article to be not very good either. It makes a claim that rape gangs are unlikely because of the very few number of defendants. But that was part of the whole scandal (ie authorities kept looking the other way).

On the contrary, from what I can gather the 250k figure seems like a perfectly reasonable estimate, and is probably actually lower than the real number as the Rape Gang Inquiry Report suggests.

Firstly, the report clearly says this figure is an estimate only and the countersignallers only trying to "debunk" this figure are by disingenuously portaying as a hard statistic with bad methodology.

Secondly, while the estimate is extrapolating from data from the Rotherham inquiry (and a couple of other smaller inquiries) and you can criticise how accurate such and extrapolation can be:

  • there is no reason to doubt the original Rotherham estimate which itself was conservative.
  • using Rotherham to extrapolate from is actually a reasonably conservative example as the percentage of Rotherham who are Muslims is actually lower than the UK as a whole.
  • the percentage and certainly the absolute number of Muslims in the UK has gone up, not down. The problem would have gotten worse since the Rotherham, not better.
  • as noted below, the number covers all kinds of child sexual exploitation, not just rape though the scale of that shouldn't be downplayed either (while the Rape Gang Inquiry emphasise rape, it's clear from other parts they are referring to a broader category of sexual exploitation).
  • if you do a very basic, extremely unsophisticated extrapolation of Rotherham to the whole of the UK population you end up with a figure more like 500k not 250k, by my back of the envelope calculations.

You can quibble about how specifically representative Rotherham is, but basically the argument comes down to whether you this Rotherham (and some of the other local inquiries) are broadly, if imprecisely, representative of Muslims in the UK, or you think Rotherham was just some weird fluke or exception.

I have no reason to believe it isn't or wouldn't be representative, and on balance the evidence that does exist seems to suggest the opposite.

It seems grossly unjust for the entire British state apparatus to cover up, refuse to record or report statistics on this matter, and then at the same time supportors of this apparatus turn around and reject any estimate based on the infomation that is available. We all know why there isn't more information and stats being reported. The criticism is all being made in bad faith. I am yet to see a single person make a reasonable counter-estimate. I have not seen someone say, "actually 250k is maybe too high, actually 200k/100k is more reasonable for these reasons."

The approach is basically to assume that 250k is an absurd number to begin with, and then work backwards to "prove" it's false with no real counter-estimate or one that's ironically absurdly low. It's apparently not absurd to believe the official British Government estimate that 3.1 million people in the UK have experienced some kind of child sexual abuse, but it is absurd to believe that 250k is a generally reasonable estimate of those raped and abused by Muslims specifically.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report is sloppy in some respects, I don't deny but its general thesis and reporting is correct.

Alongside what everyone else has said about how you can reasonably arrive at this figure, I also want to point out that there's nothing unusual about this figure in the historiography of atrocities. Extrapolating from Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale etc is crude, but it's the same starting point that similar studies of covered-up atrocities had to work with. Demanding perfect precision at the outset, in a context where authorities are suppressing data, would mean never recognizing most historical atrocities.

To the extent the report makes a mistake, it's mistake is not showing it's calculations in greater detail and not giving a range. But most historians aren't statisticians and many quoted ranges are taken from taking the credible lower-bound figure given by one historian against the credible higher-bound figure given by another, not some statistical analysis of uncertainty.

There are to my knowledge only two serious pieces of scholarly work on the subject of Grooming Gangs. Peter McLoughlin's Easy Meat, and Rupert Lowe's report. To get anywhere into the ballpark at this early a stage is more than you could expect. To contrast with a work that was at a similarly early stage of Scholarship, consider Mark Twain's far more bombastic claim about the Congo Free State's atrocities from King Leopold's Soliloquy:

They go shuddering around, brooding over the reduction of that Congo population from 25,000,000 to 15,000,000 in the twenty years of my administration; then they burst out and call me "the King with Ten Million Murders on his Soul." They call me a "record." The most of them do not stop charging merely the 10,000,000 against me. No, they reflect that but for me the population, by natural increase would now be 30,000,000, so they charge another 5,000,000 against me and make my total death-harvest 15,000,000.

More recent scholarship leans towards 1.5 million, though given the poor record keeping a higher figure closer to Twain's claim cannot be ruled out.

As for the argument that Lowe is biased. Yes. He is. As was Mark Twain. You can contrast his bias against the bias of British Institutions, which until recently would have put the number of victims of "Pakistani Grooming Gangs" as 0 by denying the very concept.

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.)

now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists)

Surely this can't be serious? I've worked with numerous people who went down the autistic adult male to trans woman pipeline. I doubt I would have known even a single person like this thirty years ago. Are we really to believe that this was all due to anti trans activists?

An interesting question with all the “autistic trans programmers” where is the trans-Bill Gates in his 60’s who transitioned a decade ago when it became normalized. Last I checked Bill Gates is on Epstein Island in his old age not suddenly trans.

Bill Gates isn't rich because he was a great programmer.

I am using his name as a stand-in for great programmer then.

But he’s credited with developing MSFT originally software and had a 1590 SAT score back when that was rare and students could get into Harvard with 1300. If he’s not a stand-in for great programmer then I have no idea whose a great programmer.

He was a fine programmer, but there were many better programmers to work at Microsoft then and now. What he was, and what the autistic programmers often are not, was a brilliant businessman, and that made all the difference.

Yeah, the way the small Microsoft basically slew the juggernaut IBM's personal computer division (it took some time to bleed out, of course) and secured itself a place as one of the most powerful and important companies on the planet is the stuff of business legends.

in the future use Fabrice Bellard as your example, he deserves it. or Steve Yegge if you want to troll.

Seldomly on hacker news a woman is linked „look at this awesome womens youtube channel collecting miniature-clocks/explaining-soldering-electronics/extremely-male-nerd-hobby“ and it is always an old geezer who recently transitioned to a womens name.

It's kind of a meme or cliche in the gaming communities that any time someone talks about a woman speedrunner or pro e-sports player who performs at a world-class level, the odds are at least 9/10 that it's a trans male. That said, your comment reminded me of the YouTube channel Britta Food4Dogs, who, AFAICT, is just a regular old woman who seems to have genuine love for extremely nerdy JRPGs and other anime-related media, from watching some videos of her covering some very niche nerdy visual novels that I'm familiar with.

To be honest, at this point whenever I see mention of a woman in programming (or other very nerdy things like speedrunning), I assume that it's a dude until I see evidence to the contrary. It's just by far the more likely bet, in my experience.

What a lovely channel!

When I read or watch information about some of the best game programmers of the 80s I remember multiple times where the person transitionned later in life. The only one that comes to my mind spontaneously is Daniel/Danielle Bunten (creator of M.U.L.E, one of the best early Electronic Arts titles). Going by google, there's quite a few more, including some with some notable credits to their names, certainly more than you'd expect for that generation.

Surely this can't be serious?

Surely there's a deadnaming joke in there somewhere.

Surely it was a man's name before that Bronte lass popularised it for her heroine!

I feel like Mottizens are probably more likely than most to have run into MtFs in their day-to-day life as a result of affluence, education, industries of choice etcetera. Admittedly mostly the 'Speedrunning-American' class of such.

Define "transition". If transition means teenagers receiving more mental health counseling and hormones that blunt part of the effects of puberty, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better. If transition means some soft boys and girls uncomfortable with their sexual development donning new clothes and personae as they settle into a community of support, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better. If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody. I guess you can always find someone delusional enough to feel better after almost anything. Doesn't the term "Stockholm Syndrome" exist to diagnose a particular case where the objectively bad experience of being kidnapped can be seen by the victim as a good development? What are we being asked to concede here? It's not clear to me.

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

... Is that really how you see it? That is not my impression at all. Trans activists deliberately made themselves subject to public scrutiny and public outreach as an attempt to re-enact the classic Civil Rights playbook. LGBT organizations deliberately moved to push trans rights as the next frontier after the success of gay marriage. Liberal activists happily complied and began campaigns to push trans equity groups in corporate spaces and pronouns in professional working environments. Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn in 2015. That was the point at which a generation of online debate about trans rights finally bubbled up into the mainstream. Then Jordan Peterson achieved notoriety for refusing to comply with amendments to Canada's Human Rights Act that would compel preferred pronouns. North Carolina's "bathroom bill" in fact was only a response to ordinances from local municipalities that passed pro-trans legal codes first.

Likewise, JK Rowling only started associating with TERF causes after perceived trans excesses that began the whole debate. It isn't as if conservatives woke up and decided that they needed a new scapegoat one day and the trans community was as good a target as any.

If anything, it seems to me like trans activists succeeded in their public outreach, then overreached by doubling down on trans kids. Now that the tide is shifting against trans rights, the movement is unable to admit that their own strategies had anything to do with anything.

Define "transition".

The study defines it thus:

Medical GR interventions included masculinising/feminising hormonal treatments, chest masculinisation, and/or genital surgery (vaginoplasty/phalloplasty/metoidioplasty). Hormonal GR was recorded if the register of the SII showed that the patient had purchased masculinising/feminising hormones with a special reimbursement code that is available for individuals diagnosed with F64.0 in the nationally centralised GIS when the treatment has continued for a year. Information on surgical GR was obtained from the CRHC.

It doesn't state how many just got hormones and how many got surgery.

hormones that blunt part of the effects of puberty

Not sure what you mean by this. Puberty blockers or actual HRT? Obviously puberty is difficult for many and putting it off can prevent temporary discomfort, if that's what you mean, but in fact many trans people are happier after going through puberty, provided that it's the right puberty.

If transition means some soft boys and girls uncomfortable with their sexual development donning new clothes and personae as they settle into a community of support, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better.

You mean social transitioning? The study was about medical transition. If it were just clothes and personae, the controversy would be much less severe.

If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody.

You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries. Some of the dissatisfaction with SRS may be attributed to ineptly performed operations. The linked subreddit has much discussion on the quality of different surgeons, which varies greatly. One is dubbed "the butcher of Montreal"; another is widely known to be substandard and people only go to them because they're the only one covered by insurance.

And in any case, many trans people, even after socially transitioning and getting on HRT, prefer not to get SRS.

I guess you can always find someone delusional enough to feel better after almost anything.

What objective metric do you propose to measure whether or not someone is better off other than asking them if they feel better?

Trans activists deliberately made themselves subject to public scrutiny and public outreach as an attempt to re-enact the classic Civil Rights playbook. LGBT organizations deliberately moved to push trans rights as the next frontier after the success of gay marriage. Liberal activists happily complied and began campaigns to push trans equity groups in corporate spaces and pronouns in professional working environments. Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn in 2015. That was the point at which a generation of online debate about trans rights finally bubbled up into the mainstream. Then Jordan Peterson achieved notoriety for refusing to comply with amendments to Canada's Human Rights Act that would compel preferred pronouns.

And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition, and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought. Like in Iran.

"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."

"Oh. Okay."

That's the normal response. The kind of response a person not looking for another culture war battle to fight would give.

And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition

This is a little disingenuous. It was treated as a curiosity and a medical condition. It was specifically the activists who declared that it is an identity and absolutely not a medical condition, which was the genesis of the whole controversy.

Transvestites have been a curiosity since time immemorial. Dysphoria has been a medical condition in the books ever since we've had books. Don't pretend like it was the anti trans lobby that made this an issue.

If people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition

The implementation of the liberal affirmative model accompanying a medical model put this to bed. You can't have a medical condition and a socially affirmative model assisted by wide celebration of concepts of identity placed in proximity to the general population, including children. You can't do so and claim you are adhering to rigorous medical research which has a default answer of "We don't know" to many basic questions about the condition, causes, and populations effected. Not when advocates and experts in medicine insist dysphoria is not a prerequisite for transgenderism.

If the Dutch Protocols led to 20 years more rigorous study with small experimental cohorts that invited critical dissent and testing, trans people not only would be better off but we might have a more advanced understanding of the condition. Of course if you tolerate slow, plodding research that demands dissent to progress in experimental areas -- to question and define the nature of gender, sex, identity and dysphoria -- you will have condemned some small number of trans people to suffering. They would have suffered for a purpose, namely a greater understanding and a lower profile that provided more tolerance via obscurity. Maybe we could do brain scans by now to screen or something.

The ideal outcome was for trans research to go on as a medical venture without ideological or social interest. An interesting article in The Atlantic would have popped up every few years. By now trans people would know know about the trans-Mecca neighborhood in Seattle in the event they were born in Utah.

The implementation of the liberal affirmative model accompanying a medical model put this to bed. You can't have a medical condition and a socially affirmative model assisted by wide celebration of concepts of identity placed in proximity to the general population, including children.

Some people are attention-seekers; therefore, everything believe is wrong?

You can't do so and claim you are adhering to rigorous medical research which has a default answer of "We don't know" to many basic questions about the condition, causes, and populations effected. Not when advocates and experts in medicine insist dysphoria is not a prerequisite for transgenderism.

If your belief is that there isn't enough gatekeeping – which I agree with – then argue that, and not that all trans people are wrong and need to be stopped, etc.

If the Dutch Protocols led to 20 years more rigorous study with small experimental cohorts that invited critical dissent and testing, trans people not only would be better off but we might have a more advanced understanding of the condition. Of course if you tolerate slow, plodding research that demands dissent to progress in experimental areas -- to question and define the nature of gender, sex, identity and dysphoria -- you will have condemned some small number of trans people to suffering. They would have suffered for a purpose, namely a greater understanding and a lower profile that provided more tolerance via obscurity. Maybe we could do brain scans by now to screen or something.

The ideal outcome was for trans research to go on as a medical venture without ideological or social interest. An interesting article in The Atlantic would have popped up every few years.

Yet no one (other than me?) is arguing that. It's either the unquestioningly pro-trans side, with all the valid criticisms you listed, or the absolutely anti-trans side, claiming trans people are perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc.

I'm not arguing that. I made a statement about what has happened and proposed a counter-factual I consider plausible with hindsight. Unfortunately for real trans people, if this is a meaningful category, there are no do overs in Discourse. The critics you hand wave away or condemn -- the TERFs and conservatives with all their vicious nasty political, legal, and cultural warfare -- you have them to to thank for pushing against the medical profession led around by so-called bodies of experts like WPATH. If you consider your position the popular one historically and currently, then all I can say is don't outsource your advocacy in the future.

I believe society can make more fascists, murderers, or homosexuals if a society chooses to do so. We know this, because different societies have had different rates of fascists, murderers, and homosexuals across time and place. There are limits to what a society can impose with propaganda, culture, circumstance, or leverage with individual genetic predisposition. But those limits include fascists who don't believe in fascism and homosexuals who like brunch but don't enjoy gay sex very much. Many raised murderers will be bad at murdering and some might not even enjoy it. Does a real murderer include murderers who feel shame and regret, or murderers who fail at murdering despite their best efforts?

What does belief have to do with this medical condition? I have a general idea of what it has to do with something like schizophrenia. We speak around a confused pit of philosophical, psychological, sociological, and medical concepts. Stick your hand in, pull out what you want. It's beyond me I'm afraid. I do strongly believe that the ideal treatment for someone with gender dysphoria is an antidote that cures them. Seems to me medical transition and social acceptance lands short of general miracle cure status, so yes it's probably best we don't experiment on children until results improve or alternatives are found. Are alternatives being researched?

You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries.

Firstly, I think it's profoundly condescending to tell someone they've been "fed" cherry-picked stories, dumb sheeple that they are. Secondly, @Shakes wasn't passing a value judgement on the efficacy of bottom surgery: the part of his comment that you quoted is literally just an (accurate) description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Thirdly, it's rather hypocritical of you to accuse someone of having fallen for cherry-picked stories that portray bottom surgery negatively, then link to a subreddit that selects for people who are happy with their surgeries while excluding detransitioners (or, more sadly, people who took their own lives after undergoing bottom surgery). Fight cherry-picking with studies and meta-analyses, not cherry-picking in the opposite direction.

What objective metric do you propose to measure whether or not someone is better off other than asking them if they feel better?

This proves too much. Heroin addicts claim to feel better when they use heroin. (I don't even disbelieve them – I'm sure they do feel happier in the short-term.) The fact that gender reassignment surgeries open their recipients up to a host of health problems they would not otherwise have had seems as good an "objective" metric as any other. As you more or less concede in the top-level comment, the question of whether surgical transition actually improves trans people's mental flourishing certainly seems to be an open one, and the point of medical studies is to give us hard data which will inform our decisions on whether it's a good idea for individual patients. If 90% of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria saw a durable uplift to their subjective well-being after undergoing surgical transition, it would be a no-brainer. 70%? Sure. 50%? Hmm – you might need to have a bit of a think about that one. 30%? Probably not until you've already tried several years of talk therapy. 10%? Only as a matter of last resort for those in such severe psychic distress that it's this or suicide.

If a person is considering undergoing a major elective medical procedure which will render it impossible for them to have children and opens them up to a host of medical problems they would not otherwise have had, we need robust data on the efficacy of that procedure in improving its recipients' subjective sense of well-being. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "well, some people feel better afterwards" simply isn't good enough. (All of this goes double if you're expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill, as some trans activists demand.)

Personally, I support bodily autonomy for adults – but if one of my loved ones was considering surgically transitioning, I would do everything in my power to try to dissuade them. (In much the same way that I support the right of adults to practise polyamory or pursue careers in pornography or the entertainment industries, even though I know that the overwhelming majority of people who do so will see their subjective well-being take a hit as a result. If a close female friend of mine was considering starting an OnlyFans, I would support her right to do so, but I would also tell her that this is a decision she will almost certainly regret.)

and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought

When convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are demanding to serve their sentences in the female estate and these demands are being granted – then yes, this is a woke perversion to be fought. It's pure historical revisionism to claim that gender-critical people started this fight and that "trans people just want to live their lives in peace".

I know I keep referencing this example, but it's because I simply can't effin' believe it happened in reality. And the trans cheerleaders still insist this is a real lady who is being oppressed and discriminated against and horribly mistreated by not being allowed back into a women's jail (presumably to impregnate more of her cellmates?)

And this all happened as a result of laws supposed to be anti-discriminatory, which then got twisted into test cases and "yes, the prison system of this state can be forced to put a guy with functioning male reproductive system into a women's prison" was the result.

The sex in this case was consensual. No one was harmed, other than the potential children if they didn't end up being aborted. The claim was trans women would be raping cis women prisoners. If anything, having consensual sex makes your prison experience nicer. Not that I think it's a good thing.

Claims of rape are still baseless. Trans women who've been on hormones for years can't even get an erection. And a feminine-looking individual, regardless of what you believe their gender is, is at serious risk in an American men's prison (not that most feminists care about men being raped). Ideally a distinction would be made between people who were on hormones before going to prison and those who "come out" as trans only after being locked up to stir shit because they're antisocial degenerates who want to watch the world burn. (I mean, ideally prison rape would be addressed, but that's far more ambitious.)

Trans women who've been on hormones for years can't even get an erection.

Well this guy clearly could, and all his "transness" consisted of was growing out his hair and changing his name. That's the problem: you're trans if you say you're trans, you have to be treated according to your gender identity, you don't have to transition medically or surgically unless you want to, trans women don't owe you femininity, etc.

As I said, I agree there should be standards for trans people to be treated as their preferred gender. But if that's what you believe, advocate that, instead of claiming that all trans people are perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc., and none of them should be treated as their preferred gender.

Claims of rape are still baseless.

You obviously aren't familiar with "Karen" White. What do you mean by "baseless"? Do you mean that no trans-identified inmate in a women's prison has ever raped one of their fellow inmates?

According to the Guardian, there were 97 sexual assaults in the female estate between 2016-19, of which 7 were committed by transgender inmates. At the time there were 3,795 people housed in the female estate, of whom 34 were transgender. In other words, a transgender inmate is ~10 times more likely to sexually assault a fellow inmate than a cisgender female inmate.

But sure, "baseless".

Firstly, I think it's profoundly condescending to tell someone they've been "fed" cherry-picked stories, dumb sheeple that they are.

Maybe "fed" is the wrong word, but I've seen the images they've seen, the collages, the screenshots, the threads, that gave them that opinion on SRS.

Secondly, @Shakes wasn't passing a value judgement on the efficacy of bottom surgery: the part of his comment that you quoted is literally just an (accurate) description of what a vaginoplasty entails.

Doctors would not describe a neovagina as an "open wound".

Thirdly, it's rather hypocritical of you to accuse someone of having fallen for cherry-picked stories that portray bottom surgery negatively, then link to a subreddit that selects for people who are happy with their surgeries while excluding detransitioners (or, more sadly, people who took their own lives after undergoing bottom surgery).

I mentioned people unhappy with their surgeries and if you'd bothered to click on the link you'd've seen the thread titled "Unhappy with my results" right there on the front page (it was there yesterday, it's a bit more hidden now; instead there's one titled "Really disheartened." now).

This proves too much. Heroin addicts claim to feel better when they use heroin. (I don't even disbelieve them – I'm sure they do feel happier in the short-term.)

Usually they admit when it wears off somewhat that they're actually miserable and their life sucks. They're not acting rationally when they shoot up. Trans people don't go back and forth like that.

The fact that gender reassignment surgeries open their recipients up to a host of health problems they would not otherwise have had seems as good an "objective" metric as any other. As you more or less concede in the top-level comment, the question of whether surgical transition actually improves trans people's mental flourishing certainly seems to be an open one, and the point of medical studies is to give us hard data which will inform our decisions on whether it's a good idea for individual patients. If 90% of people diagnosed with gender dysphoria saw a durable uplift to their subjective well-being after undergoing surgical transition, it would be a no-brainer. 70%? Sure. 50%? Hmm – you might need to have a bit of a think about that one. 30%? Probably not until you've already tried several years of talk therapy. 10%? Only as a matter of last resort for those in such severe psychic distress that it's this or suicide.

If a person is considering undergoing a major elective medical procedure which will render it impossible for them to have children and opens them up to a host of medical problems they would not otherwise have had, we need robust data on the efficacy of that procedure in improving its recipients' subjective sense of well-being. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "well, some people feel better afterwards" simply isn't good enough. (All of this goes double if you're expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill, as some trans activists demand.)

I'm confident that criteria could be developed that, when administered by an experienced psychiatrist, their mind clouded neither by transphobia nor by trans-affirming delusions, could determine whether someone would actually benefit from transition with >90% accuracy.

When convicted male rapists with intact genitalia are demanding to serve their sentences in the female estate and these demands are being granted – then yes, this is a woke perversion to be fought. It's pure historical revisionism to claim that gender-critical people started this fight and that "trans people just want to live their lives in peace".

If your concerns are about trans prisoners specifically, talk about that instead of accusing all trans people of being perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc.

  • -10

but I've seen the images they've seen, the collages, the screenshots, the threads, that gave them that opinion on SRS.

What "opinion"? @Shakes gave an entirely accurate description of what a vaginoplasty entails. Are you claiming the description is inaccurate? If so, how?

Doctors would not describe a neovagina as an "open wound".

And a used-car salesman wouldn't describe a lemon as a lemon. Of course the person selling something will try to present it in as flattering a light as possible.

Usually they admit when it wears off somewhat that they're actually miserable and their life sucks.

Citation requested. Many heroin addicts (and alcoholics, gambling addicts etc.) never admit that they have a problem or that their lifestyle is unhealthy.

They're not acting rationally when they shoot up.

Who are you to decree who is and isn't acting rationally? According to you, it doesn't matter if medically transitioning sterilises the recipient and opens them up to a host of health problems they wouldn't have otherwise – the only thing that matters is that they subjectively report feeling happier afterwards. By your own logic, a heroin addict who consistently maintains that heroin makes him happier is acting rationally, and the fact that heroin objectively destroys his mind and body and imposes negative externalities on the broader society is immaterial.

Trans people don't go back and forth like that.

Then why does /r/detrans have a five-figure number of subscribers? Why do most trans children desist before adulthood?

talk about that instead of accusing all trans people of being perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc.

When did I do that?

The normal response to defecting from gender roles is, uh, not a polite 'oh. okay.'. Go wear a dress in public(and not in the gay district) with a big bushy beard if you don't believe me.

Surely you will agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a progressive utopia where gender roles have been abolished. They just weren't ideologues looking for a fight to pick (in this one specific respect).

"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."

"Oh. Okay."

That's the normal response. The kind of response a person not looking for another culture war battle to fight would give.

That's the normal response where underlying it is "okay, some people are crazy, God love 'em, and need mental health services, but what has that to do with me? Oh, one of those crazy people wants to be in the bathroom, or store changing room, or other intimate space with me. And they've still got their man bits. Ooookay... no."

Do you look at other people's genitals in the toilet or the changing room? How does it affect you? Especially women's toilets which only have stalls and no urinals.

  • -11

There's actually been incidents in which transwomen have their dicks out in women's locker rooms. Widely reported on if you are curious and wish to Google it. That obviously violates social norms.

Okay, are we talking about toilets or locker rooms?

Regarding locker rooms, how does a trans woman's penis negatively affect the cis women in the locker room? Just look away.

And does it not equally violate social norms to have a trans woman's breasts, which look like normal female breasts, displayed in a men's locker room?

With this logic men should be allowed in the women's locker room. Those women are free to look away from my penis also. In what way is its mere presence wounding them? The only point of sex restricted spaces is to avoid this one situation. The social norm of private nude spaces for only one sex.

My understanding is that the reason for segregating locker rooms by sex is to prevent men from looking at women because that would make the women uncomfortable, not to protect men's eyes, and, to a much lesser extent, to prevent women from looking at men because that would make the men uncomfortable, not to protect women's eyes. Yes, this does ignore LGB people, but sex-segregated locker rooms originate in an era when LGB people were ignored.

More comments

Well, you appear to be saying that let's all be reasonable, let's all agree on something, can't we all let's agree that some trans therapy works for some patients. And I want to be reasonable, so I ask, ok, which trans therapy? And the answer seems to be all of them all the time.

I'm willing to concede that sometimes trans therapy helps some people. This doesn't seem to cost me very much. The standard is merely whether it makes some people feel better, which seems like something almost any treatment could achieve. I think sugar pills would make some people feel better.

But then, is this the most reasonable standard? There are some treatments I would never consider good treatments no matter how many people they made feel better. That's not me trying to argue as such, that's just me trying to be open about how much I'm willing to concede. For instance, I just don't think "having your dick cut off" or vaginoplasty is really a valid form of treatment. I'm not saying this as the result of any evidence about post-op follow-up studies. For me that evidence doesn't even register. You can call me retrograde for this, I won't mind. But I do observe that sometimes people enjoy things that are objectively bad for them. This is what I mean when I use the word "delusional" (which, with apologies, I am not trying to direct at transgender individuals in particular.) There's no limit to what people could convince themselves is good. So at a certain point I stop looking at their own evaluations of whether they feel better and I start substituting my own judgment of the world. Which includes my judgment against vaginoplasty.

But I'm willing to concede that the world is big and that there are a lot of people in it.

And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition, and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought.

I mean, do you think that there is no perversion in the trans movement at all? Gay rights went through this in the 90s where a significant part of the movement was in fact made up of organizations like the "North American Man-Boy Love Association". And the movement kicked those people out and tried to present itself as "normal". And then the public started to accept it more. And there are still people who dress up in leather on the sidewalk and piss on each other in public. And there are gay activists who declare that they're proud to be perverts and that being perverted is good.

As in, you're trying to fundamentally change what people understand by the basic biological categories of male and female, and not only is that controversial by itself, but there is in fact a lot of deviance within the trans movement. And I don't say that to be mean, I'm sure there are a lot of trans individuals who are basically "normal". But acting as though everything in the movement is totally normal and it's the anti-trans activists who made everything toxic seems like denial as a strategy.

There are some treatments I would never consider good treatments no matter how many people they made feel better. That's not me trying to argue as such, that's just me trying to be open about how much I'm willing to concede. For instance, I just don't think "having your dick cut off" or vaginoplasty is really a valid form of treatment. I'm not saying this as the result of any evidence about post-op follow-up studies. For me that evidence doesn't even register. You can call me retrograde for this, I won't mind.

So it's some kind of irrational bias?

I mean, do you think that there is no perversion in the trans movement at all? Gay rights went through this in the 90s where a significant part of the movement was in fact made up of organizations like the "North American Man-Boy Love Association". And the movement kicked those people out and tried to present itself as "normal". And then the public started to accept it more. And there are still people who dress up in leather on the sidewalk and piss on each other in public. And there are gay activists who declare that they're proud to be perverts and that being perverted is good.

As in, you're trying to fundamentally change what people understand by the basic biological categories of male and female, and not only is that controversial by itself, but there is in fact a lot of deviance within the trans movement. And I don't say that to be mean, I'm sure there are a lot of trans individuals who are basically "normal". But acting as though everything in the movement is totally normal and it's the anti-trans activists who made everything toxic seems like denial as a strategy.

Certainly there are perverts, according to any reasonable definition, in every letter of LGBT. What I object to is the notion that being trans (or LGB) is in itself a perversion.

So it's some kind of irrational bias?

I have a penis and this physical experience tells me that mutilating it would be extremely bad. I am so confident in my experience that studies and polls where people claim to have benefited from mutilating their penises are unconvincing to me. This is extremely rational.

Certainly there are perverts, according to any reasonable definition, in every letter of LGBT. What I object to is the notion that being trans (or LGB) is in itself a perversion.

Look, I'm gay, I get it. "Perversion" is a normative word. And we can all collectively decide that being gay is normal and being trans is normal and therefore not perverted. And this is a coherent definition and everybody knows what we mean. In fact, this is probably what most people mean at this point.

But also the biological "norm" is for man to reproduce with woman and for man to stay a man. Social convention can't change that. And by any reasonable definition what we're talking about is perverted. We are literally perverting normal biological sex.

Reasonable minds can disagree and this ultimately becomes a mere semantic point in a liberal society. Perversion is accepted, it's a liberal society. It doesn't really matter if we call it perversion or not. But I think it is a perversion. A lot of people think so. And when we try to deny that and act as though there's something wrong with them, that sounds like denial.

Like in Iran.

"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."

"Oh. Okay."

Isn't the Iran solution to force gay men into reassignment surgery or execute them?

It's not exactly a San Francisco of anything-goes roles that you seem to suggest.

There's a four-panel Anakin/Padme joke in here somewhere.

  1. I think we should treat gay and trans people like Iran does.
  2. Treating it as a curiosity and a medical condition?
  3. ...
  4. Treating it as a curiosity and a medical condition, right?

Indeed, they don't treat gay men very well, but it's very interesting how this doesn't extend to trans people. This suggests that transness is not necessarily a controversial political question closely associated with LGB rights. It just became one in the West due to contingent historical circumstances. But it could have gone the other way, and that is the whole point of bringing up Iran. Iran is not some kind of progressive utopia – trans rights don't have to be a progressive, woke, liberal or left-wing issue.

It's a very interesting question, and certainly one which people who want to discuss the culture war rather than wage it should care about, why and how something becomes a culture war issue.

If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody.

You've been fed cherry-picked information about sex reassignment surgery. Many people are, in fact, happy about their surgeries. See /r/Transgender_Surgeries.

That's not cherry-picked information. That is one of the medical interventions in question. That is an actual trans medical intervention, and that is what happens in that surgery. The penis is removed. You are left with an hole that needs to be constantly dilated. You don't get to just waive your hands and say the magic words "cherry-picking" to dismiss arguments you don't like.

You pointing us to to reddit . com for a bunch of people happy with that same surgery is an actual example of cherry-picking.

"Some people prefer to be referred to as a gender different from the one they were born with."

It was never just this, don't lie to us.

That's not cherry-picked information. That is one of the medical interventions in question. That is an actual trans medical intervention, and that is what happens in that surgery. The penis is removed. You are left with an hole that needs to be constantly dilated. You don't get to just waive your hands and say the magic words "cherry-picking" to dismiss arguments you don't like.

You pointing us to to reddit . com for a bunch of people happy with that same surgery is an actual example of cherry-picking.

I've seen the images they've seen, the collages, the screenshots, the threads, that gave them that opinion on SRS. It's not neutral, unbiased coverage.

I mentioned people unhappy with their surgeries and if you'd bothered to click on the link you'd've seen the thread titled "Unhappy with my results" right there on the front page (it was there yesterday, it's a bit more hidden now; instead there's one titled "Really disheartened." now).

It was never just this, don't lie to us.

So are you saying that if that had been the demand, you would have agreed, but you disagree with the greater demands that trans activists are actually putting forth? If that is the case, treat people as their preferred gender, since you agree that's reasonable, and don't acquiesce to the greater demands. There are certainly many things trans activists advocate that I disagree with.

I've seen the images they've seen, the collages, the screenshots, the threads, that gave them that opinion on SRS. It's not neutral, unbiased coverage.

Lol

So are you saying that if that had been the demand

No I said that was never the demand, and I asked you not to lie to us that it was the demand, and now I am telling you that when you argue with someone and try to make a point to them by telling them something that both of you know is not true they are only going to change their mind about your credibility.

I mentioned people unhappy with their surgeries and if you'd bothered to click on the link you'd've seen the thread titled "Unhappy with my results" right there on the front page (it was there yesterday, it's a bit more hidden now; instead there's one titled "Really disheartened." now).

Cherry-picking negative examples from your reddit cherry-pick

Doesn't the term "Stockholm Syndrome" exist to diagnose a particular case where the objectively bad experience of being kidnapped can be seen by the victim as a good development?

In that particular case, the police somehow managed to make literal bank robbers the lesser evil!

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.

I take the opposite stance, regardless of mental health outcomes banning people from transitioning is wrong. The discussion isn't just about trans people, but the underlying thought processes involving the role of government and restrictions to "save people from themselves". And those thought processes have real consequences.

The FDA is already really bad for this, the US government takes an approach that everything is basically banned until "proven" safe. Our default is that you are a moron who can't be trusted to take any risk. And this means small stuff like why you can't buy good sunscreen, to more serious issues like why it's difficult for terminally ill patients to try new risky procedures, or as this ACX post has gone over before, why your child might have died because they couldn't get European fish oil.

And it delays medical and scientific advances a lot! Look at this estimate putting the COVID vaccine by 2033. Thank god for operation warp speed allowing us to bypass tedious bullshit (or at least do them simultaneously) and get it out in less than a year. Imagine if other medicine could come out so quickly like the GLP1s! Imagine how many lives could be saved or improved if not for the nanny state "protecting" us.

The we must protect morons from themselves stance inevitably means treating you as a moron too. You must be kept safe from the sunscreen that is widely used in Asia and Europe. You must be kept safe from experimental treatments before you die. You must be kept safe from saving your kid. You must be kept safe from deciding that you're happier with cross sex hormones. You must be kept safe from scientific advancements. You are a moron, you do not get to make your own choices, the central bureaucrats simply know better.

We don't stop this by engaging in more banning. We have to throw away the entire concept in the trash, and accept that yes morons will sometimes make moronic decisions that hurt themselves but restrictive government just means treating everyone as a moron. I don't see myself as a moron. Does anyone here think differently of themselves?

A fine stance to have, but it runs into difficulties with children and minors and the question of whether they can, or should be allowed to, provide consent.

That's a similar issue of how much more controlling we have gotten about children as well. My parents are old enough that as children they would go out biking around the neighborhoods miles away without supervision, without cell phones, and without much worry from my grandparents. In fact it was expected that you would go out and play for the most of the day and come home for dinner. This was the norm.

I wasn't allowed very far, but I could bike around the neighborhood some, go to neighbors houses to hang with the kids there, go down to the local pool. Maybe get dropped off at the mall as a teen and hang out there or whatever.

Now, 11 year olds aren't trusted to go to a different aisle in the grocery store. A different aisle in the same store.

We have decided that modern kids are morons in ways that they weren't for the entire rest of history. And we've culturally decided that too, where parents who don't engage in hysteria get CPS called on them constantly and some parents have ended up arrested. Which means even I have to be cautious in the freedoms I give my own kids, not even the same ones I had growing up yet alone those of my parents. Not by choice, but because government enforcers decided my kids are apparently too stupid to walk down to a nearby store or something.

Modern society coddles our children and trains them to be immature and incapable in their teens. But not too long ago, a good bit of those teenagers would have been off from their families working jobs as squires or farmhands or "youngsters" midshipmen or something else speaking of ships, a cabin boy or an apprenticeship for the local blacksmith/tailor/etc or whatever else. The world wasn't rich enough to coddle older children and teens from serious work and serious decisions, so the teens were capable. They had to be.

Which is another important point. Coddling makes us weaker. When government treats us like morons, we slowly become morons even when we are capable of more. We are lobotomized by paternalist attitudes.

I heavily agree with this post and the one up above about allowing medical procedures.

There is a frustrating modern tendency to either have allowed and encouraged, or discouraged and forbidden.

I'm libertarian and I'd like drugs, gambling, prostitution, plastic surgery, porn, etc to be legal and discouraged.

Seeing them legal and encouraged has really strained my principles here. If I'm absolutely forced to choose between the two realistic options ... I'd pick legal for everything to deny the state the capacity. But if they already have the capacity, I'd be picking illegal for some things. Gender reassignment is probably one of them.

Seeing them legal and encouraged has really strained my principles here. If I'm absolutely forced to choose between the two realistic options ... I'd pick legal for everything to deny the state the capacity. But if they already have the capacity, I'd be picking illegal for some things. Gender reassignment is probably one of them.

Well do keep in mind that there's also illegal and encouraged. People will just ignore the law and at some point you're stuck fighting a losing battle trying to actually enforce it too much. You haven't actually stopped it, you're just harassing people every once in a while.

Traffic enforcement is at constant odds with this issue, no one wants speeders in their neighborhood but everyone wants to speed in other neighborhoods. People even get pissed at you if you don't speed. We all accept it as technically against the law, but there's no winning the fight here. You can't even automate the process because no one wants it. We will not stop the speeders, so we just give everyone a x% chance of being unlucky and paying a fine each time they drive.

It's the same thing with a lot of drugs, and prostitution and gambling. There's just only so much you can do, because lots of people want it and they want it very much. And enforcing against it can just make them pissed. Joe Rogan famously smokes weed on his podcast despite being in Texas. Will Texas authorities ever go after him? No. Actually enforcing Texas's marijuana laws like that is unpopular and they know it.

You can change a fair bit with law, and you can harass random people every once in a while like we do with traffic enforcement and prostitution stings but in general if people want it they'll just do it anyway. The people who really want to gamble will find a way to gamble. The people who really want a prostitute will find some sort of escort loophole. The people who really want drugs will get it. And the markets will respond, the demand pulls in more supply. There's a reason why Trump's drone strikes on traffickers hasn't done much, because markets. If supply goes down then price goes up and there's more reward to providing new supply. Even Singapore struggles.

But even the data we do have show the number of detained drug users steadily rising, especially among youth under 20. If demand didn't exist, smugglers wouldn't regularly risk their lives muling their product into the country.

And likewise people who really want to transition will find a way. People manage it in Russia of all countries, they will handle it here.

I deleted a section on kids, that I think would have completed my post.

Snoop Dogg is effectively allowed to encourage people to smoke weed as a matter of free speech.

Your average school teacher is effectively prevented from doing so as a matter of job security.

I'd probably be fine with gender reassignment surgery being in the same legal category as weed currently is. Some more liberal states allow it. Some require basically a fake doctors note. Everyone agrees to keep it should generally be kept away from children, even if some 16 year olds manage to get access. Cops won't arrest you for it. Banks won't take money from businesses that engage in it. (By the way I'm not saying that I think weed is treated appropriately, I'd prefer it be treated more like alcohol)

I'm not a paternalist, and I was much more not a paternalist when I wasn't an actual father. The way the legal landscape and public school works these days means that I want transition soft banned so schools can't advocate for it and do it behind my back. You might think I'm crazy to be worried about such a thing, the only place that sort of craziness occurs is in like two counties in northern Virginia that keep making national news over those issues ... well I live in one of those counties. And I have three daughters, and one of them already insists on calling herself a boy and she isn't even in kindergarten. So I have worries about how that kid and the school system will interact.

I'm at a stage in life where a lot of my legal preferences are highly selfish. I really don't care if a stranger gets a transition and ruins their life and looks, or fulfills their lifelong dream and never experiences hardship again. I just don't want my daughter being talked into it by an ideologically captured teacher that only feels fulfillment in their life by acting out the most extreme forms of progressive activism. So I want it softly illegal. If I can't get that, at least make motorcycles illegal (guess which daughter really wants to ride one of those).

at least make motorcycles illegal (guess which daughter really wants to ride one of those).

Let your daughter be a tomboy, by the time she's old enough to ride a motorcycle she may no longer want to 😊

George (actually, Georgina) is Julian, Dick and Anne's cousin. She is a tomboy who demands that people call her George instead of Georgina; she cuts her hair very short and dresses like a boy. She is headstrong and courageous by nature and, like her father, scientist Quentin Kirrin, has a hot and fiery temper. Introduced to the other characters in the first book, she later attends a boarding school with Anne where the teachers also agree to call her 'George'. Blyton eventually revealed that the character was based on herself. It is notable that the chief protagonist of the Malory Towers stories also possessed a fiery temper as a defining character trait. George has a loyal dog named Timmy who would do anything for her. She often gets cross when anyone calls her by her birth name or makes fun of Timmy, and she loves it when somebody calls her George or mistakes her for a boy. In Five Get into a Fix, old Mrs Janes mistakes her for a boy: even though Julian had told her that she was a girl, she later forgets this. George sometimes takes this to the point of asking that her name be prefixed with Master instead of Miss. Various references have been made to what meaning should be read into this – for instance "I remember reading in my first Famous Five book about a girl called Master George. What a puzzle and thrill. She claims to never tell lies as that is cowardly."

We are fine letting her rock it as a tomboy. We basically shop in the little boys clothes section, she is signed up for tball, calls girls icky etc. My family has a history of tomboys, my mother and sister were both like that. They are both happily married to men.

We just don't want that to lead to some overzealous guidance counselor getting her on puberty blockers or something.

I think we're all negotiating on price. Like, to give the obvious example, do you think kids should be allowed to kill themselves? Hell, do you think they should be allowed to apply for euthanasia if they get depression? I'd say no, and I'd say that on the grounds that most kids disallowed from killing themselves will, on reflection (and usually not that long a reflection!) be glad that they were stopped; their coherent extrapolated volition is to be disallowed from something that stupid. Hell, I've attempted suicide three times and am glad I was stopped the latter two (the first one I wasn't actually stopped; I just failed by myself).

Medical transition is not as serious as literal suicide. It's also far more serious than essentially everything else on the list of things the fun police don't want to let kids do with maybe the exception of some drugs. Kids playing by themselves without supervision are very unlikely to be maimed for life. Kids medically transitioning will with near-certainty. So one can consistently support free range kids and still oppose transitioning kids, at least as long as one doesn't take "free range kids" to the psychotic extreme of "deliberately let the kids jump off cliffs!".

I think we're all negotiating on price. Like, to give the obvious example, do you think kids should be allowed to kill themselves?

It's not illegal for a kid to try to kill themselves. Most kids don't commit suicide for the simple reason that they don't want to kill themselves and of those kids who do, it is not the law that serves to prevent their deaths. No suicidal child says "I was gonna jump off the roof but 5(b) makes it a criminal charge with a two year probation if caught".

It's not illegal for the kid to go wandering around the neighbourhood either (the kid won't be charged with a crime); the problem is that the laws/policies punish the parents for physically allowing him/her to so wander. Likewise, there are a zillion ways in which things are set up to prevent kids from killing themselves, and it would (AFAIK, though IDK about Canada) be illegal for a euthanasia clinic to assist a child suicide.

I don't think anyone's arguing for kids to be considered criminals for trying to transition; the anti-trans side want teachers and doctors (and maybe parents) to be liable for facilitating that transition, and for parents to not be punished for preventing that transition.

I'm often pretty moronic. That doesn't make me more in favor of restrictive government, though. The average representative there seems to be even dumber than me, and we may be unable to choose better ones, because the median voter seems to be even dumber than them! I'll take my chances with my own decisions, thanks.

The FDA is already really bad for this, the US government takes an approach that everything is basically banned until "proven" safe. Our default is that you are a moron who can't be trusted to take any risk. And this means small stuff like why you can't buy good sunscreen, to more serious issues like why it's difficult for terminally ill patients to try new risky procedures

The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.

And sure, I can do the research myself. But I don't want to do that every time I go shopping. I also don't trust 90% of the population to do it right, especially not against hostile advertising. And sure, both sunscreen brands can be sued under some libertarian arbitration scheme. But I like not having skin cancer more than a 7 figure settlement (or getting nothing besides the privilege of watching my opponent go bankrupt). I can see the argument for experimental drugs for terminally ill patients. But terminally ill people are desperate, and absolutely need some form of protection - at least against financial exploitation.

And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.

Why not have “FDA approved” products but still allow other products? You can buy FDA approved sunscreen and know it’s not coconut oil or benzene.

Since that "FDA approved" label on the box is likely to cost millions (maybe billions) of dollars, I don't think you can make it optional. The price discrimination would be too large, and many products categories would stop entirely having new products FDA approved, leaving us only with the "legacy FDA" products already in the market.

Since that "FDA approved" label on the box is likely to cost millions (maybe billions) of dollars

It doesn’t have to. What if, instead of companies applying, the FDA seeks out products that meets its standards, and/or creates its own approved baseline?

Products that don’t get FDA approval (unless the FDA allows them to pay for the necessary tests themselves) are disadvantaged, but it’s better than today where they’re outlawed.

the FDA seeks out products that meets its standards, and/or creates its own approved baseline?

To preserve any kind of quality, this means multi-stage trials and double blind studies. That's where the cost is. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the current system is good. But it is extremely difficult to improve it.

Better start small: I think FDA exemptions for terminally ill patients with informed consent should be fast-tracked and default-approved. Maybe add some profit limit to prevent exploitation of the desperate.

Or a larger step: identify international partner organizations with adequate quality control. If something has been legal in Japan or the EU for five years, strongly accelerated approval should be possible.

The alternative is clearly worse. Because what sucks more than not having Euro sunscreen? Giving someone money for a jar of "SPF50 coconut oil" and burning lobster red. Giving somebody money for bootleg Asian sunscreen and getting a batch contaminated with benzene (carcinogenic in California, and everywhere else). Both happened. Both are worse than having a small selection of reliable sunscreen.

That's called fraud. We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue. People lying about the contents of a product or what it can do is a different category than "here's product A, it's used as a sunscreen in Countries X, Y and Z"

And don't get me wrong, the FDA isn't really doing a good job here. But it's a job that needs to be done, and probably to a standard that's not so far removed from what is done today. Regulations are written in blood, ect.

Some do get written in blood sure, but tons of regulations are just made up. Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist, like why does being a barber in NC require almost 1600 school hours plus a 12 month apprenticeship? Do we genuinely think that this is because there was a bunch of wild barbers out there chopping people's ears off like they're Sweeney Todd? No. It's to make it more difficult for haircutting alternatives and drive up prices.

That's called fraud.

In the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure. But I have to think for a long time until I can think of the first product at a supermarket that has an industry-defined label I respect (in fact, I can only think of greenwashing labels I don't trust ("fair trade", "organic") and technical standards I trust unconditionally ("USB-C" is a very reliable label, even on AliExpress).

We can enforce against fraud without requiring genuine suppliers to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars "proving safety" of something widely used around the world without issue.

Can we? Sunscreen is like the lowest common denominator, and it already gets tricky. Someone has to check for efficacy and side effects. The age of mineral-based UV filters is long past, today sunscreen often contains organic UV filters. A common conspiracy theory is that those organic rings are more harmful than sunburn itself - so someone better check side effects. And, sure enough, the organic UV filters from the 80s easily end up in detectable doses in blood, urine and breast milk of people who use them, and sure enough, they interact (weakly) with estrogen, androgen, or thyroid hormone receptors. Should this be allowed? Is this still acceptable? And should we really let sun screen producers answer those questions for us? (Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)

Lots of regulations are even made just to make it more difficult for competition to exist

Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.

I have to think for a long time until I can think of the first product at a supermarket that has an industry-defined label I respect.

Top Tier gasoline (1 2) comes to mind.

Huh, interesting. That one was firmly on the long list of labels I was fairly confident to be complete garbage. I never buy that stuff, and my last three cars made it well past 200k without a single instance of engine troubles. "Gunk" in the engine itself sounds like such a 1970's problem, I haven't ever heard of anybody having trouble with that.

the US, the FDA defines what "SPF50" even means. They have norms and test protocols to ensure this significance. Without the FDA, coconut oil has SPF50 for all intents and purposes. Could some other industry committee define "SPF", and sue cosmetic companies that use it wrongly? Sure

A government organization could still exist to define things in a certain way and charge people for fraud if they make the false claim to fit the government set definition when they don't, without having to also ban access to anything and everything that doesn't fit. If the government wants to define ice cream as a certain x% butterfat then so be it, as long as I'm still allowed to buy things that aren't at that percentage.

(Ironically, those old aromatics are still in use today in US sun screen, most other countries have moved on to newer, larger and better organic filters, which the FDA hasn't evaluated yet and which pass through the skin much less readily)

It is not ironic that the market has already moved into safer and better filters while the central bureaucracy at the FDA has failed to keep up. It is a major part of my complaint. It's not just that paternalism treats us like morons, it's that paternalism is also done by morons whose priorities and definitions don't align with everyone else. People want those better filters, but isn't there someone you forgot to ask?

Yes, without doubt. I'm not actually all that pro regulations. But that doesn't mean we can just remove them all, Chesterton’s Fence is there for a reason - maybe not a good reason, but I like my food and my drugs well tested. My barber may be held to lower standards.

There should also be good reason when regulations are put up too. And just because it's "safety coded" doesn't even mean it makes an impact. Look at the push for single stair reform for instance, the two means of egress model not only costs way more money but an actual irony here, can end up hurting people more due to the other design decisions forced by such choices.

Regulations can hurt people a lot. Like why don't many apartments have elevators? Over regulation on the size, maintenance and labor requirements wildly drive up prices so they no longer pencil in for many new developments. How many people suffer trying to haul furniture up multiple flights of stairs because of this? I have a friend who was injured moving a dresser once, that could have been prevented if it wasn't for regulation blocking elevators.

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.

Neither of those argument doesn't work. There are 3 groups in the study:

  • people with dysphoria pre- some form of transition (blockers, hormones, surgeries)
  • people with dysphoria post- transition
  • people without dysphoria as controls

The conclusion isn't based on just comparing trans people to controls It's based on how theie mental health deteriorated after transition. I also remember the author of the interview saying all students get a regular (yearly?) mental health assesment in Finland.

But my fundamental objection is to the conclusion that no one should be allowed to transition.

I agree that this study is not enough to conclude that, but I don't I've seen anyone say "this study clearly shows that no one should transition". Instead, it is a rebuttal to the pro trans narrative that claims they are able to accurately diagnose dysphoria, and that these interventions not only help, but are medically necessary. This conversation has a long running context, where the pro-trans side was deliberately misleading people and attacking skeptics for years, so I don't think it's right to try and portray them as saying "well, we just think there's a non-zero number of people who might benefit from this"

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.

The kind of people who say "no one should transition" don't so much believe some one "isn't their stated gender", they question the very concept of gender. I think it's a strong argument, "gender" is effectively a religious belief. Specifically it seems that it's a secular version of the belief in a soul, and I think it's fair to say that this is not a valid basis for a medical intervention

I also don't see the contradiction. You can say "no one should transition", and "this social contagions seems to be affecting mostly adolescent girls". I see no presupposition of validity of other people's gender dysphoria.

Gender-as-distinct-from-sex is either of nonsense or actively reifying stereotypes, take your pick. Souls are more coherent than strict self-ID gender. That sounds harsh, but for those following along at home, play this out for a minute. If your gender has no connection to the outside world, it's just your internal experience and label for yourself that you definitionally can't be wrong about, then there's absolutely zero reason for anybody to ever treat anybody else differently based upon their gender. There's no reason for gendered spaces or activities or anything at all, and so since the outside world has no reason to care, poof! Bye, gender. Trying to hold onto it is going to just wrap around into it not mattering or build up inconsistencies and nonsense. So for gender to be A Thing about which We Should Care, it has to have some ties to the outside world. Being distinct from sex, we're already ruling out biology. So that leaves social/cultural factors, which are not innate, not inherent, and indeed we see them vary by culture. So we should care about a bundle of traits and properties a particular culture has decided go together - that is a stereotype!

If women are people who X and only X, then let's just deal with X directly rather than lay an extra category on top. If women are people who X and Y, then baby you've got a stew stereotype going! If women are people who call themselves women and nothing else, then we've no reason at all to care. Once you take the biology out of the gender, you have nothing left that anybody can or should care about but social and cultural baggage, and so by clinging to it and impressing how important it all is to you, you're just strengthening your cultural stereotypes and calling 'em sacred. Quit it.

The '90s had the right idea. Boys can wear dresses and have tea parties, girls can play with monster trucks and hit one another with sticks, etc and so on, and none of those things make them not boys or not girls. Let the words refer to the biological reality underneath that is true and correct in 99+% of cases, invent special terms for the outliers if you must, drop the social/cultural barriers, and just let people do their thing. There's no reason for all the hassle, and it can't and won't get anybody any more freedom anyway.

You want to take hormones and are otherwise okay with opening the gates on letting people put stuff in their bodies if they feel like it, go for it. You want to wear 'gender inappropriate clothing' and are otherwise okay with a general lack of expected dressing standards, go for it. You want elective/cosmetic surgery so that your body is more pleasant for you and are otherwise okay with people having other such surgeries, go for it. Do What You Want, up to the limit of what you think society should allow in general, because you are not a special case. You cannot be a special case, because there is nothing special underneath. You're just a boy or a girl who wants to do an activity which is not gated by gender.

IMO trying to completely separate gender from its biological aspect is partly cope for the fact that transition is an imperfect technology and not everybody ends up passing, and no surgery can make you have the reproductive functionality of the opposite sex yet.

Most trans people desperately want to be the opposite sex on a biological level and a trans woman being allowed to wear dresses because boys can dress however they want won’t help with the fact that her hips are too narrow and she hates having stubble and that having a penis means most men will be uninterested in dating her, and that she won’t be able to have a normal sex life regardless, or have children the normal way, etc.

The '90s had the right idea. Boys can wear dresses and have tea parties, girls can play with monster trucks and hit one another with sticks, etc and so on, and none of those things make them not boys or not girls.

Wasn't this at least part of the motivation behind the thing with the drag queens?

  • people with dysphoria pre- some form of transition (blockers, hormones, surgeries)
  • people with dysphoria post- transition
  • people without dysphoria as controls

One problem is that when considering the effect of an intervention, this is basically an apples-to-oranges-to-licorice comparison.

The gold standard for determining the effect of an intervention would be a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Take a patient and then prescribe them either a puberty blocker or a placebo, so that neither you nor they know what they got, and then follow up on the outcome years later.

Obviously this is hard to do for ethical reasons. But anything else risks simply measuring confounders. Perhaps the people opting for intervention simply had a higher trust in their medical system, and consequently were also more likely to seek psychiatric help with other problems. Or a million other things.

The kind of people who say "no one should transition" don't so much believe some one "isn't their stated gender", they question the very concept of gender. I think it's a strong argument, "gender" is effectively a religious belief. Specifically it seems that it's a secular version of the belief in a soul, and I think it's fair to say that this is not a valid basis for a medical intervention

This is not my experience. The anti-trans side believes very strongly in their conception of gender, hence all the bathroom bans. Someone who actually rejected the concept of gender might preach some kind of pansexuality where you simply do not care what kind of sex bit your partners have. They might reject the very concept of straight and gay couples because There Is No Gender, Man.

By contrast, the people most offended by trans people believe very strongly in the existence of gender, they just happen to think that it is identical to sex-assigned-at-birth.

Obviously this is hard to do for ethical reasons. But anything else risks simply measuring confounders.

Oh, that's rich. When the Cass Review pointed out that the evidence for trans medicine is of low quality, the pro-trans side was claiming that it's oh-so-unfair that Cass would only declare a study "good" if it's double-blind (spoiler: she didn't), but now we're supposed apply that standard to studies with negative results, otherwise the interventions should be deemed good by default? How does that make any sense?

This is not my experience. The anti-trans side believes very strongly in their conception of gender, hence all the bathroom bans.

That sounds like your belief in gender being so strong, that you can't conceive of someone having an alternative belief, and interpreting their thoughts through your lens. Why would I need to believe in "gender" to segregate people by sex?

By contrast, the people most offended by trans people believe very strongly in the existence of gender, they just happen to think that it is identical to sex-assigned-at-birth.

That makes no sense. Let's say I accept "gender" exists, even under that belief system it's possible to say "even though we sometime segregate people by gender, in this context it's more appropriate to segregate them by sex". I've been told that by pro-trans people! So if I can segregate people by sex when gender exists, I can do so when I think it doesn't.

The anti-trans side believes very strongly in their conception of gender, hence all the bathroom bans. Someone who actually rejected the concept of gender might preach some kind of pansexuality where you simply do not care what kind of sex bit your partners have. They might reject the very concept of straight and gay couples because There Is No Gender, Man.

By contrast, the people most offended by trans people believe very strongly in the existence of gender, they just happen to think that it is identical to sex-assigned-at-birth.

This is a weird framing. I wouldn't say I believe in gender, but think it's identical to sex (not "sex-assigned-at-birth", just "sex"). I would say that, of the two, sex is the only thing that actually exists. No one actually has a "gender identity" (hell, no one can even provide a cogent, non-circular definition of what "gender identity" even is), but even if they did, it's a bad idea to design public policies around unfalsifiable claims people make about their own inner experiences. "Gender identity" meets this description, "sex" does not, ergo "sex" is a good basis on which to design public policies and "gender identity" is not.

I think we are just arguing over semantics. Of course, if "gender" and "sex" are co-extensive, then there is no need for two different words.

If we were in a society of peafowl or nudists, that would work. You just see the colorful plumage (or the penis) of the person you meet, and you know for certain that you are dealing with a male.

In most human societies, it is not as easy to identify the sex of another person. Asking them to show you their genitals is mostly frowned upon, so you rely on Bayesian evidence -- beards, breasts under clothing, gendered clothes, height, hairstyle, behavior, voice register. All of these can be mimicked, and depending on the social setting some trans people might pass.

"Sex and gender are co-extensive" is a claim which can only be made if one has two different words. Even if it was, it might still be worthwhile to keep the two terms around to discuss this fact. Physics has a concept of "inertial mass" and "gravitational mass", even though as far as we know both are co-extensive.

If I were to ask evangelicals if they supported "traditional gender roles", I think most would affirm (even if they would prefer the vaguer phrasing of traditional family values). If I asked them if they supported "traditional sex roles", they would likely be confused. Am I some freak talking about missionary sex, or an even greater freak talking about sexual roleplay, or am I talking about some ancient environment, as in "males specialize in hunting mammoth, females in picking berries", and could I please avoid saying the s-word?

For what it's worth, I am not a gender fanboy. My (mostly underinformed) impression is that while there are some social sciences who do an admirable job of cargo-cult science, gender studies do not even rise to that level and are probably about as epistemically useful as theology. I just do not think that the main concept they are (presumably) dealing with is devoid of meaning.

In most human societies, it is not as easy to identify the sex of another person.

impossible to have a conversation with someone who asserts such transparently false things

I think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.

Now, you could claim that it is only true in that technically sense, as in "it is more reliable to tell apples from oranges through genome analysis than it is to tell them apart through looking at them" -- which would be technically true if there is some weird apple where eyeball id is less than 100% accurate, but functionally false, because nobody is ever likely to encounter that counterexample in the wild, and insisting on running every fruit through PCR is utterly pointless from telling apples from oranges.

For pre-pubescent kids, I do not think that it is particularly easy to tell their sex absent social norms ("boys have short hair and wear blue clothes with dinosaurs, girls have long hair and wear pink clothes with unicorns").

I will grant you that after puberty, most people can reliably pass for their sex even without social cues. Voice register alone probably suffices. I will also grant you that societies can eliminate most adversarial examples by simply punishing trying to pass as a sex you were not assigned at birth by stoning: if I see a bearded Taliban gunman, I do not really have to check the inside of his pants to know what genitals he will have. It is technically possible that it is a trans-man on T, but I would expect there to be less than one such instance in all of Afghanistan.

In freer societies, people are allowed to pass as the other sex/gender, or not prominently display their beard or breasts to the world and thereby sort themselves into one of the categories.

It might be that the rest of the world is much better at id-ing sex in Western adults than I am. Perhaps the rest of you have basically a built-in millimeter wave scanner and I am just to autistic to notice. I mostly rely on secondary sexual characteristics (which can easily be acquired through HRT, or even faked through props) and social conventions.

Luckily, there is very little reason for me to know the sex of a random person in the street. The only exception would be "can we produce offspring together" (which of course also hinges on other factors). I am a member of a K-selected species, the number of times a trans-woman has tricked me into courting by pretending that she could bear my children has been exactly zero. In practice, "could we beget viable children?" is rarely the first thing on my mind when I encounter a person in the street.

The way I see it, genders have their origins in traditional sex-based roles in societies, but I do not think that it needs to stay that way. Things evolve. Ridley Scott is obviously not a mounted warrior aristocrat. To my knowledge he does not maintain any warhorses or plate armor, does not have a fief granted to him, does not follow the code of chivalry and has never been seen leading a cavalry charge against the enemies of his liege. Yet he is a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.

Still, I am totally fine with saying "he got a knighthood". In case there is any confusion, I can use the term GBE and everyone will know what kind of knight he is. In 1100CE this would never have been possible, but today cavalry has been obsolete in warfare for a century, so we can repurpose the term.

Human females were mostly reduced to their reproductive capability in earlier societies. This seems obvious from the quaint custom of referring to them as either Miss (eligible) or Mrs (married). (There was probably a third category of woman who had sex before marriage and was therefore ineligible to bear heirs, but I doubt there was a honorific for that role.)

Today, society has recognized that human females can also contribute in other ways than making babies. Very few people are interested in whether an unmarried woman who has her uterus removed for medical reasons should be called Miss or Mrs. Granted, gestation still happens in vivo, so the bearing of children is not yet as obsolete a concept as shock cavalry, but much less important than it was 100 years ago.

I think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.

a "technically true" statement that has no bearing on reality has no value

In most human societies, it is not as easy to identify the sex of another person.

Ah yes, one of those incredibly difficult tasks that babies learn to do before they can walk or talk.

I agree that this study is not enough to conclude that, but I don't I've seen anyone say "this study clearly shows that no one should transition".

That's the certainly the impression I got from people citing the study, even if none of them said so explicitly. Do you agree some people should transition?

Instead, it is a rebuttal to the pro trans narrative that claims they are able to accurately diagnose dysphoria, and that these interventions not only help, but are medically necessary. This conversation has a long running context, where the pro-trans side was deliberately misleading people and attacking skeptics for years, so I don't think it's right to try and portray them as saying "well, we just think there's a non-zero number of people who might benefit from this"

I am not the pro-trans side; I am one person on this website. You are arguing with my claim that some trans would benefit from, and should be allowed to, transition.

The kind of people who say "no one should transition" don't so much believe some one "isn't their stated gender", they question the very concept of gender. I think it's a strong argument, "gender" is effectively a religious belief. Specifically it seems that it's a secular version of the belief in a soul, and I think it's fair to say that this is not a valid basis for a medical intervention

A simple concept of "gender" that avoids any metaphysical or spiritual claims is that "my gender is 'woman'" means "I want to be treated, in most social situations, as you would treat the average person with XX chromosomes (however you refer to such a person)". I realize this is not the version typically advocated, but I am not the typical pro-trans advocate.

That's the certainly the impression I got from people citing the study, even if none of them said a@so explicitly.

You might be picking up correctly what their opinion is, but not their justification for it. It's particularly strange you claim that it has something to do with the study, when they don't say anything of that sort explicitly.

Do you agree some people should transition?

Depends what exactly you mean. There are scenarios where I believe people should be allowed to transition if they want to, but I don't think they should. But either way my opinion is not based on that study, nor am I using it the study to back that particular opinion.

I am not the pro-trans side;

I think that if you're going criticize the arguments people are making, you should take the context in which they are made, and what they're responding to, into account.

A simple concept of "gender" that avoids any metaphysical or spiritual claims is that "my gender is 'woman'" means "I want to be treated, in most social situations, as you would treat the average person with XX chromosomes (however you refer to such a person)". I realize this is not the version typically advocated, but I am not the typical pro-trans advocate.

If "gender" is just a desire for being treated that way, than clearly that desire exists, but then people who say "no one should transition" aren't saying "X isn't their stated gender", which would have to mean "they don't actually have that desire", they're saying they're refusing to fulfill it.

You might be picking up correctly what their opinion is, but not their justification for it. It's particularly strange you claim that it has something to do with the study, when they don't say anything of that sort explicitly.

Here I said trans people are happier if they are allowed to transition and get treated as their preferred gender, and that therefore they should be allowed to transition and get treated as their preferred gender, and someone pointed to the study to rebut my claim.

If "gender" is just a desire for being treated that way, than clearly that desire exists, but then people who say "no one should transition" aren't saying "X isn't their stated gender", which would have to mean "they don't actually have that desire", they're saying they're refusing to fulfill it.

Yes, the terminology would have to be adjusted. Other than that, do you agree that that view of gender is reasonable?

Here I said trans people are happier if they are allowed to transition and get treated as their preferred gender, and that therefore they should be allowed to transition and get treated as their preferred gender, and someone pointed to the study to rebut my claim.

You made a general empirical (which you emphasized yourself) claim, and the study was used to refute it. It was not used to make a normative claim applicable to everyone, including the most exceptional cases.

Yes, the terminology would have to be adjusted. Other than that, do you agree that that view of gender is reasonable?

Reasonable in what sense? In a descriptive one, in that there indeed are people who have such a preference? Sure. Or reasonable in a prescriptive sense, in that adopting such view of gender, and doing everything in your power to fulfill such desires would somehow be good for society? No, I disagree with that.

I highly doubt you're arguing in good faith here.

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.

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:

  • rewriting history and Wikipedia to avoid "deadnames" in a very Stalinesque/Orwellian way
  • policing of pronoun usage, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail
  • being forced to loudly affirm that trans people and ideologies are the bestest ever, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail
  • destroying the categories of "male" and "female" in all discourse
  • having no willingness to rein in (or even acknowledge) bad actors who are feigning transness as a way to invade women's spaces and sports

yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now

This is a hilariously absurd take. You're just shit-stirring.

rewriting history and Wikipedia to avoid "deadnames" in a very Stalinesque/Orwellian way

Wikipedia is a private organization and is allowed to set their policies as they please.

penalties ranging from loss of employment

Employers should have a right to free association and should be able to fire someone for any reason they please.

to jail

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.

being forced to loudly affirm that trans people and ideologies are the bestest ever, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail

Same thing with this. Employer right to free association is based, government compelling something is not.

destroying the categories of "male" and "female" in all discourse

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

having no willingness to rein in (or even acknowledge) bad actors who are feigning transness as a way to invade women's spaces and sports

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.

Moreover, Shapiro notes that the male actors involved were not willing to undergo the necessary procedures to be able to participate on women's teams

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.

  • -23

having no willingness to rein in (or even acknowledge) bad actors who are feigning transness as a way to invade women's spaces and sports

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?

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.

Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In what way have you not been allowed to criticize Wikipedia?

The only thing that libertarians require here is that it not be made illegal

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.

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.

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.

  • -10

In what way have you not been allowed to criticize Wikipedia?

You were the one who implied he shouldn't criticize Wikipedia, by giving the "but it's legal" retort. Come on now.

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

suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:

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 allowed to criticize Wikipedia.

He is also welcome to start his own version with deadnames and deadpronouns if he feels like it.

The old "recreate pillarized civilization from the ground up" retort, really?

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.

More comments

In what way have you not been allowed to criticize Wikipedia?

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.

Employers should have a right to free association and should be able to fire someone for any reason they please.

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.

any society that passes and maintains an anti discrimination law is one already broadly against discrimination

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.

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.)

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.

customers who resent that gay people are permitted to keep their blood inside their bodies

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?

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."?

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.

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.

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.

Neil Gorsuch addressed this already as a staunch textualist.

An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

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.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

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.

  • -12

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.

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.

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.

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.

Khelif was also assigned female, raised as a girl, and lived through her life as a woman

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.

It also depends on the intersex condition in question too, there is way more than just 5ARD

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.

And things like the SRY gene test can not be following the historic definition, as genes were not known until very recently.

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.

You're dodging the central point, which is that ancient cultures already knew that geuevedoces weren't women.

One ancient culture, which also isn't even fully true as plenty do continue to live as women

Imperato-McGinley's thorough medical investigations showed that in most cases their new, male equipment seems to work fine and that most Guevedoces live out their lives as men, though some go through an operation and remain female.

So even in the specific Dominican Republic culture, 5ARD is not always man.

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.

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".

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.

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!

It's settled science that Imane Khelif is a man in all ways that matter for the purpose of boxing.

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.

More comments

The problem with this response has always been is that categories vary wildly between groups.

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.

Categories are made for man, not man for the categories.

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.

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.

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

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.

Speaking of, that's an example! "Man" in Scott's case is referring to humans, homo sapiens.

In other words, you just don't like it.

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?

Meta discussions about words and meaning have been here since the beginning of rationalism

That is what I call damning with faint praise.

you want to be reductive, sure. I don't like murder either, or green bell peppers.

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.

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.

It's disguised in a wordy way to appear sophisticated, but there is nothing substantial said here.

That is what I call damning with faint praise.

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.

More comments

Wikipedia is a private organization and is allowed to set their policies as they please.

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.

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

suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:

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.

  • -11

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."

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.

Wikipedia is a private organization and is allowed to set their policies as they please.

and they should choose different policies.

Employers should have a right to free association and should be able to fire someone for any reason they please.

and they should choose different policies.

Same thing with this. Employer right to free association is based, government compelling something is not.

and they should choose different policies.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

and they should choose different policies categories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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:

  1. Any person who self-declares themselves as the opposite of their biological sex is the opposite of their biological sex.
  2. That person has always been the opposite sex!
  3. Absolutely no medication or change in behavior is required to become the opposite sex.

It’s like thinking overweight people who take GLP-1 antagonists are delusional about thinking they’re actually skinny.

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.

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.

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.

But I'll bite and explain once more. According to mainstream gender ideology:

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.

Absolutely no medication or change in behavior is required to become the opposite sex.

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?

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.

This is the vast majority of trans people I know, at least for hormones and wardrobe, behaviour is somewhat hit or miss.

claiming someone needs to transitions to be “valid” as a transgender makes you truscum which is practically as bad as being a TERF

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.

Anyone who believes trans people literally become the opposite sex by self declaration is delusional and an idiot.

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”.

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)

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?

  • -10

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

  • -11

they're banning trans people completely

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".

More comments

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.

But I'll bite and explain once more. According to mainstream gender ideology:

  1. Any person who self-declares themselves as the opposite of their biological is the opposite of their biological sex.
  2. That person has always been the opposite sex!
  3. Absolutely no medication or change in behavior is required to become the opposite sex.

My understanding of the matter is more:

  1. Any person who self-declares themselves as the gender opposite of their biological sex is the opposite gender to their biological sex.
  2. That person has always been the opposite gender.
  3. Absolutely no change in biological sex is required to become the opposite gender.
  4. Other people's biological sex, if they don't bring it up, is none of anyone else's beeswax.
  5. If you can tell that someone's biological sex is partially or entirely mismatched to their gender, you should keep that to yourself unless they bring it up first, just as you would if they had an embarrassing skin condition or a missing limb.

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.

don’t believe in the gender/sex distinction but it’s central to the mainstream trans viewpoint

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!

However, pregnancy can be a challenging time emotionally. Transgender men and transmasculine folks who become pregnant often experience scrutiny from their communities.

As Kaci points out, “There’s nothing inherently feminine or womanly about conception, pregnancy, or delivery. No body part, nor bodily function, is inherently gendered. If your body can gestate a fetus, and that’s something you happen to want — then it’s for you, too.”

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.

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.

Other people's biological sex, if they don't bring it up, is none of anyone else's beeswax.

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.

If you can tell that someone's biological sex is partially or entirely mismatched to their gender, you should keep that to yourself unless they bring it up first, just as you would if they had an embarrassing skin condition or a missing limb.

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?

If you can tell that someone's biological sex is partially or entirely mismatched to their gender, you should keep that to yourself unless they bring it up first, just as you would if they had an embarrassing skin condition or a missing limb.

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.

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".

Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte.

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.

More comments

If you can tell that someone's biological sex is partially or entirely mismatched to their gender, you should keep that to yourself unless they bring it up first, just as you would if they had an embarrassing skin condition or a missing limb.

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.

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.

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.

Even if she does have XY chromosomes (not confirmed),

Strange, given Khelif has admitted it.

More comments

Whether Khelif is trans or has a vagina really depends on which definition you use, but let's talk about something more interesting:

she and her entire family have believed she is female her whole life

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.

More comments

which makes me think you are trans-identified yourself

@rae is trans, yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cutting off an arm is clearly a much worse (and more irreversible) level of harm than surgery on your genitals.

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.

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.

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?

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.

These "we have to do the bad thing to them or else they will do the bad thing to us" statements are facile.

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?

Did the British make a mistake in acquiescing to the post-WWII European security architecture?

Undeniably

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.

rewriting history and Wikipedia to avoid "deadnames" in a very Stalinesque/Orwellian way

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.

policing of pronoun usage, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail

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.

being forced to loudly affirm that trans people and ideologies are the bestest ever, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail

Has that ever happened?

destroying the categories of "male" and "female" in all discourse

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.

having no willingness to rein in (or even acknowledge) bad actors who are feigning transness as a way to invade women's spaces and sports

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.

Has anyone ever gone to jail because of pronouns?

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.

you'll notice that all they've done is change the terms to "AMAB" and "AFAB", respectively.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

the replacement of commonly used anatomical terms with ghastly, dehumanising substitutes like "front hole", "chestfeeding", "birthing person" and "menstruators"...

"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.

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 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?

We have people here claiming she is a man.

"People here" including Khelif themself.

Would you not agree that, in her case, "assigned" rather than "observed" is the correct term to use?

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.

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?

"Destruction" and "demolition" are very strong words.

"People here" including Khelif themself.

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.

"Destruction" and "demolition" are very strong words.

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.

More comments

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.

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.

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.

Where the hell did THAT come from?

Where the hell did THAT come from?

Mainstream anti-trans rhetoric. Not you specifically.

...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?

I don't think that follows without more argument. It's setting off alarm bells of the shape:

  • Summarize a position
  • the summary doesn't contain necessary element X
  • therefore, the original position mustn't have contained X
  • therefore, the original position is wrong.

Your summary presupposes that some trans people are their stated gender, and I don't know if it's more accurate than other summaries that don't make that assumption, for example "this subset of trans people are deluded in this specific way (while others are in other ways)".

The treatment, whichever you prefer, should be the same.

No, absolutely not.

If gender identity and dysphoria is fixed at birth, then you have to deal with which rights to give them and what medical treatments to perform. "None" is a valid answer, even if it's not one I like.

If gender identity is mutable and dysphoria can be caused, then you also have to deal with social policies that cause or prevent it.

Your summary presupposes that some trans people are their stated gender, and I don't know if it's more accurate than other summaries that don't make that assumption, for example "this subset of trans people are deluded in this specific way (while others are in other ways)".

But the typical anti-trans claim is that being trans is itself a delusion, that one cannot change one's gender, or there is no such thing as gender, only sex, which cannot be changed, etc. In that case, why you believe you are a different gender is irrelevant.

No, absolutely not.

If gender identity and dysphoria is fixed at birth, then you have to deal with which rights to give them and what medical treatments to perform. "None" is a valid answer, even if it's not one I like.

If gender identity is mutable and dysphoria can be caused, then you also have to deal with social policies that cause or prevent it.

I'm addressing people who answer "none". People who believe trans people should have rights and get treatment, etc., but also ROGD is a thing, etc., are certainly not the majority of the anti-trans movement. I am, in fact, such a person, but I am not part of the anti-trans movement.

In that case, why you believe you are a different gender is irrelevant.

I don't see how that follows. If endocrine disruptors cause your gender-center to misfire, then the proper response is better food/material/pollution standards. If social contagion causes mass delusions, then you have to change the social context. If it's linked to abuse, then strengthen and improve child and family services. If it's purely genetic, then you're pretty much stuck with it because eugenics is unthinkable. These are not exclusive options, as different ones can be true for different individuals.

In each case the causes suggest cures. A chemical cause hints that there might be a chemical solution, and same for when it's caused by peers.

There are countless anecdotal reports online of people who are happier after transitioning.

This is fundamentally just a really bad way to judge whether a treatment works, one that we rightly dismiss for other treatments. There are also countless anecdotal reports of people who recover from cancer after faith-healing. And unlike spontaneous remission of cancer, which is rare, regression to the mean in mental health is the norm. "My mental health got so bad that I sought out X treatment, after which I got better" is the default result.

Go read Scott's Alcoholic Anonymous post (another treatment that a lot of supposed beneficiaries swear by that some critics accuse of being cult-like). Notice both how the evidence base is a complete mess (because it's really hard to test these things) and how the ultimate conclusion seems to be that AA (and pretty much all other treatments tested) is similarly effective to your doctor spending a few minutes telling you that alcoholism is bad and you should stop. Well, the evidence regarding gender transition is even worse. If it turns out outcomes for gender transition are equal or worse than your doctor spending a few minutes telling you "puberty can be scary but you'll be fine" or "accept yourself", that's something we really want to know rather than continuing with a standard treatment with so many downsides. Really it's something we should have known before establishing it as a standard treatment, but instead it went from "so rare you can't do decent studies" to "so common and standard that it would be unethical and difficult to have a real control group" without the step where we actually find out if it works.

A lot of arguments regarding gender transition research seem similar to other arguments that you pick up reading about medical research from people like Scott or Derek Lowe, just with the additional politicized element.

  1. A lot of treatments are based on popular theories on how things work that make the effectiveness of the treatment seem like an inevitability, then crash and burn in randomized control trials. Suggesting a biochemical pathway is bullshit is less likely to get you fired than suggesting "inborn gender identity" is bullshit, which makes it even worse.

  2. "The trial doesn't look good but maybe it works in a subgroup" is the sort of dubious cope you see all the time. At least the p-hackers saying "efficacy was shown in middle-aged hispanic women" have some sort of evidence, saying "okay but assuming the treatment works we just need to do a better job of diagnosing the people it'll work on" is even worse. The only saving grace is that the negative studies on gender transition aren't high-quality randomized control trials because none of the studies on the subject are.

  3. Most fundamentally, everyone knows that the vast majority of prospective treatments fail and the burden of proof is with the people who think they'll succeed. You can have a clear mechanism, anecdotes, observational trials pointing the right direction...and people know not to get too excited. Yes there are standard treatments that are grandfathered in without going through the FDA or equivalent, but the reason why that works isn't really "standard of care", it's "so incredibly obviously effective that the result was clear with much lower standards of evidence". The argument would be that gender transition is such a case, but the various negative studies (and "positive" studies that are pretty negative on closer examination) seem to show it's not really that obvious.

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?

Because it calls into doubt both the advisability of the current standard of care and the theoretical framework the treatment is based on. If "diagnose people with gender dysphoria if they say they're trans" is an effective diagnosis method, why is it getting so many apparent false-positives? If "gender identity" is an inborn trait that people have an internal sense of, how are all these people getting it wrong? Why don't they just feel "gender dysphoria" the first time someone calls them "he" and immediately stop? For those who think they're not false-positives, why does it seem to so obviously spread socially? If the answer is something like "because the born-trans members felt more comfortable coming out", how does it get such absurdly high rates among not-very-selected subgroups? If 40% of a classroom in a private girl's high-school comes out as trans, does that mean we should believe 40% of all women throughout the world and all of history are closeted transgender people? I don't think you have be certain about whether you think "inborn transgenderism isn't real" or "inborn transgenderism is real but 99% of post-surge ones are false-positives" or "more than 1% are real but there's a large fraction of false-positives" to point out the ways the dominant theoretical framework and treatment methodology doesn't really make sense. Nor is there going to be a lot of a agreement on those among critics. Also "Are there a group of people with an inborn 'wrong gender identity' disorder that is best treated through gender transition?", "Are those people 'really' the other gender?", and "Would it be best if society did X to encourage or enforce classifying them as the other gender?" are three different questions.

If "diagnose people with gender dysphoria if they say they're trans" is an effective diagnosis method, why is it getting so many apparent false-positives?

I rated your post Good, but I'll have to pull you up on this one. Gender dysphoria is the syndrome, where people start feeling terrible about their sex and sometimes get phantom-limb. It obviously exists; I've had it. The debate is about the appropriate treatment for gender dysphoria, which in my case appears to have been "ignore it and it'll go away".

Right, but "Gender Dysphoria" is the name used for the overall condition in the DSM-5. "A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics" and "A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender" are potential symptoms but not required ones. In fact diagnosing it in "Adolescents and Adults" only need 2 off this list, so for instance "A strong desire to be of the other gender" and "A strong desire to be treated as the other gender" are sufficient. (Diagnosing it in children requires 6 off a different list.) Of course in practice psychiatrists don't just do what the DSM-5 recommends and there is considerable variation.

So for those (including many psychiatrists) who believe self-identification is paramount to transgenderism, this means that a girl who comes in and says "I'm transgender" after the rest of her friend group did the same should be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria even if she doesn't seem particularly upset with her body. (Not that discomfort with your body, particularly during puberty, is uncommon. Or believing yourself to be discomforted with it after learning that's how you should feel, or saying it after learning those are the magic words you should say to get past medical gatekeepers.) That people can genuinely feel that way and then have it go away after they ignore is obviously also important, but I was referring to the issues with the concept of transgenderism that claims self-identification is all-important.

This is fundamentally just a really bad way to judge whether a treatment works, one that we rightly dismiss for other treatments. There are also countless anecdotal reports of people who recover from cancer after faith-healing. And unlike spontaneous remission of cancer, which is rare, regression to the mean in mental health is the norm. "My mental health got so bad that I sought out X treatment, after which I got better" is the default result.

It's not just mental health being vaguely "bad". It's a specific condition, gender dysphoria, that is directly alleviated by altering the person's body.

"The trial doesn't look good but maybe it works in a subgroup" is the sort of dubious cope you see all the time. At least the p-hackers saying "efficacy was shown in middle-aged hispanic women" have some sort of evidence, saying "okay but assuming the treatment works we just need to do a better job of diagnosing the people it'll work on" is even worse.

I've long thought gender dysphoria was overdiagnosed, so this isn't a "cope" I came up with on the spot.

Because it calls into doubt both the advisability of the current standard of care and the theoretical framework the treatment is based on.

Indeed it does, but it does not imply that no one benefits from transitioning.

It's a specific condition, gender dysphoria, that is directly alleviated by altering the person's body.

So, I mean, Alzheimer's is a specific condition, it's associated with elevated amyloid-beta levels, and aducanumab reduces amyloid-beta levels. We should rush out and give all the Alzheimer's patients aducanumab, right? No need for testing!

Except, wait, they did the testing and it shows that aducanumab doesn't actually slow cognitive decline, which is the outcome we actually care about. Turns out that having an explanation for how something could work doesn't necessarily mean that that explanation is correct or that it does work.

The statistics on transsexuals that transition are awful. It is possible that they're slightly less awful than the statistics for would-be transsexuals that are prevented from transitioning. I dunno, because TTBOMK nobody's actually done the RCT. Doing the RCT would be really hard due to trans activists sabotaging the control group, sure. That doesn't make not having it done less of a problem.

I will note that I had full phantom-limb gender dysphoria and (mostly) grew out of it; it's not obvious to me that the "would benefit from transition" group can actually be distinguished from the "would be harmed by transition" group.

So, I mean, Alzheimer's is a specific condition, it's associated with elevated amyloid-beta levels, and aducanumab reduces amyloid-beta levels. We should rush out and give all the Alzheimer's patients aducanumab, right? No need for testing!

Except, wait, they did the testing and it shows that aducanumab doesn't actually slow cognitive decline, which is the outcome we actually care about. Turns out that having an explanation for how something could work doesn't necessarily mean that that explanation is correct or that it does work.

Incongruous genitalia or secondary sexual characteristics aren't associated with gender dysphoria, they are gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is the symptom to be treated, unlike in Alzheimer's, where dementia is the symptom to be treated, and it was thought that targeting amyloid-beta would treat it.

The statistics on transsexuals that transition are awful. It is possible that they're slightly less awful than the statistics for would-be transsexuals that are prevented from transitioning.

It's not realistic to expect trans people to be as happy as cis people on average. Trans women generally don't want to be trans women, they want to be cis women, they want to pass and have functioning reproductive systems, etc. But this is the best we can do with current technology. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to be unhappy about this. Ugly or infertile cis women are often unhappy, too.

I dunno, because TTBOMK nobody's actually done the RCT. Doing the RCT would be really hard due to trans activists sabotaging the control group, sure. That doesn't make not having it done less of a problem.

IIRC the Cass Review suggested an RCT on puberty blockers. Not sure what's going on with that, or what their stance is on proper HRT, or if any of this is relevant to adult patients.

I will note that I had full phantom-limb gender dysphoria and (mostly) grew out of it; it's not obvious to me that the "would benefit from transition" group can actually be distinguished from the "would be harmed by transition" group.

Again, many anecdotal reports of people who tried ignoring their dysphoria and it never went away.

Incongruous genitalia or secondary sexual characteristics aren't associated with gender dysphoria, they are gender dysphoria.

Gender dysphoria is the feeling that they're incongruous, which is not quite the same thing. There are two ways to fix gender dysphoria: make the self-concept fit the physical body, or make the physical body fit the self-concept. Which works better? Well, I dunno. RCTs are the way to find out.

(Note that body dysmorphia doesn't respond well to surgery.)

Trans women generally don't want to be trans women, they want to be cis women, they want to pass and have functioning reproductive systems, etc.

You don't need to tell me that; I arguably was one.

We are doing transitions with transition therapy as it really exists, not Culture Cycle clarketech. If transition therapy as it really exists doesn't help actual life outcomes, then it shouldn't be the standard of care (with obvious knock-on effects regarding public funding for it, regarding medical advice to dysphoria sufferers, regarding letting minors do it, and regarding family-court judgements).

Again, many anecdotal reports of people who tried ignoring their dysphoria and it never went away.

Define "never". Took over a decade for me.

Maybe for some people gender dysphoria goes away, but for many it never does. "John 50" is a meme for a reason. I mean, the claim that it will go away eventually is unfalsifiable, but at some point you can be reasonably confident. Do you think there's some kind of fancy psychotherapy, or maybe medication of some kind, that could free more people of dysphoria, that is being slept on?

You don't need to tell me that; I arguably was one.

Define "never". Took over a decade for me.

I'm going to need you to clarify what exactly your condition was, because "phantom-limb gender dysphoria" doesn't mean anything. In any case, I can provide anecdotes of people "repping" (repressing) for over a decade until they gave in.

We are doing transitions with transition therapy as it really exists, not Culture Cycle clarketech. If transition therapy as it really exists doesn't help actual life outcomes, then it shouldn't be the standard of care (with obvious knock-on effects regarding public funding for it, regarding medical advice to dysphoria sufferers, regarding letting minors do it, and regarding family-court judgements).

It's imperfect now, but it's going to improve as technology advances, and it's only going to improve if we keep doing it. The fact that it's imperfect now and doesn't work for everyone is no reason to give up, otherwise we wouldn't have most of modern medicine.

I read a bit in that study, and I am not exactly overwhelmed.

The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.

Also, what one sentence claims, the next takes away:

Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up [...]

Only to note that [my addition, emphasis mine]:

After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment [which was a contraindication to gender reassignment], all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity

In the study itself, the key variable of interest was simply boolean:

Need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact (yes/no) and thereafter (yes/no) was recorded.

The impact of the quality of life on visiting a psychiatrist is hard to quantify. Both a patient who is undergoing exposure therapy to better deal with their fear of spiders before moving to the countryside, and a patient locked up in forensic psychiatry after killing someone during a psychotic episode would simply fall in the "specialist-level psychiatric treatment" bin.

The statistics section briefly discusses confounders:

In the next step, controlling for possible confounders: Birth year and index year and finally adding the need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact.

There is no discussion of any of the less obvious confounders. After all, some patients got interventions and some did not -- based on their case histories, not on some RNG, so they must systematically differ. Trivially, having gotten a medical gender reassignment might make a patient more trusting to seek out sensitive medical help (e.g. psychiatric care) in the future. Or perhaps the eye color of the doctor deciding on the intervention is both correlated with their decision -- green-eyed doctors approve more, but getting treated by a green-eyed doctor will also drive 10% of patients mad. (Unlikely, the point here is to illustrate the required paranoia when separating confounders from the effect of the intervention.)

As a data point for the benefits and risks of gender-related interventions, this study does not tell us a lot either way.

So a trans person that got a follow up psychiatrist appointment to treat ADHD or a crippling fear of heights would be counted? That’s not very useful statistic.

I suppose it would be possible, if the ADHD was severe, and and phobia was truly crippling. He was actually quoting an excerpt showing that the more mundane cases were excluded (see here).

How is it not a useful statistic? Again, the study didn't just compare trans people to controls. They compared to how the mental health of trans people developed over the years as they transition / or don't, to how it develops in the control group. The group of trans people that took blockers or hormones, or had surgeries, had a higher rate of severe mental disorders than the trans people that didn't.

Even if the modal case is a crippling fear of heights, a result showing that these crippling phobias develop after their medical intervention, but not in people who don't go through with the transition, is interesting, no?

The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.

One time in physics class I said “doubleyou” instead of “omega” and everyone laughed at me.

... because everyone knows that the "w" sound is represented by digamma in Greek.

The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.

😹 I hereby award you🥈in the One Joke championships! (The 🥇 goes to 'vegetables thing that identifies as a beef burger'.)

There is no discussion of any of the less obvious confounders.

Or the more obvious confounder that the tribe that is more likely to transition is also more likely to seek psychiatric help?

Some people use statistics as a drunk man uses lamp-posts—for support rather than for illumination.

Woke people often complain that conservatives only know how to tell one joke, but even if that were true, I will remind them that 1 > 0.

Need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact (yes/no) and thereafter (yes/no) was recorded.

The impact of the quality of life on visiting a psychiatrist is hard to quantify. Both a patient who is undergoing exposure therapy to better deal with their fear of spiders before moving to the countryside, and a patient locked up in forensic psychiatry after killing someone during a psychotic episode would simply fall in the "specialist-level psychiatric treatment" bin.

The statistics section briefly discusses confounders

They don't:

Ben Ryan: Is it fair to say that just by virtue of having contact with GIS [gender identity services—ie: the gender clinic] and undergoing GR [gender reassignment], the youth in the study cohort would be more likely to be referred to a specialist psychiatrist than someone in the general population, even if they had similar psychiatric comorbidity?

Riittakerttu Kaltiala: No. Specialist level psychiatric treatment is provided in case of severe mental disorders, and the need is assessed with national equity criteria that exist to maintain equal access across the country. Referrals to specialist level psychiatric services by different referring agents (such as primary care, GIS, occupational health, student health, private practitioners) are assessed similarly regardless of where they come from.

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 think trans people can be largely divided into two groups:

People who had an affinity for the other sex from the time they were toddlers onward. A boy who prefers dolls and dresses to cars, etc. to the point of everyone around them knowing that this toddler is behaving like the opposite sex in a somewhat obsessive way. These people I have a lot of sympathy for, even if I disagree that this means that they are the opposite sex. Dr. Kenneth Zucker mostly treated this group, and in his clinical research about 80-90% went on to become normal gay men after puberty, with the remainder going through some sort of transition in adulthood. I honestly believe most have some kind of hormonal thing, maybe their mothers took estrogen during pregnancy, maybe some other endocrine disrupter got them early on. I still think the best thing is to wait and see if the desire to transition subsides after going through natal-sex puberty, but if the only group that transitioned was this group, as adults, then I would have few qualms for transition as a medical practice.

Unfortunately, there is the second group. Mostly consists of adolescents who for various reasons started thinking that transitioning will benefit them. The RODG group. The Autogynophelia group. Autistic girls who always felt something was off but never could put it into words. ETC. There might be some hormonal issues, but most of the time it's a social contagion of some kind. For this group, transitioning is probably the worst thing for them to do. It's a harsh medical intervention for something that will typically go away after puberty and therapy. Unfortunately, this group is the largest group getting medically transitioned and contains pretty much every transperson I know IRL.

I don't think any trans person is their desired gender, but that doesn't mean that they are delusional. It really is their desired gender. It's just that desiring a gender doesn't make them that gender.

I don't think any trans person is their desired gender, but that doesn't mean that they are delusional. It really is their desired gender. It's just that desiring a gender doesn't make them that gender.

What an interesting way to put this.

I think you really need a third group: Autists for whom desiring to be the other sex is just one weird thing about them among many. These are the people who say ”I don’t understand why X should be linked to sex” and actually mean it. They are the most likely ones you’re going to run into in techie online spaces (by a massive margin).

I think that's just one segment of the second group.

A boy who prefers dolls and dresses to cars, etc. to the point of everyone around them knowing that this toddler is behaving like the opposite sex in a somewhat obsessive way.

That's the part that kills me. Being old enough that second-wave feminism was the strain predominant when I was a child and growing up, the fight was over "no, men and women don't have different brains; no, men are not innately rational and logical while women are emotional and nurturing; no, girls can like playing with trucks and boys can like playing with dolls and it means nothing more than that; no, women don't have to tick all the boxes on a checklist of sugar and spice and all things nice".

I had some disagreements with all that, but mainly I was on the side of "there is no reason, apart from personal ability and capacity, that women can't do 'male' professions and men can't do 'female' professions".

Then along comes the Great Trans Gender Whoop-De-Do and now suddenly gender essentialism is back in town. Skirt go spinny, tee-hee! Your toddler pulls the ribbons out of her hair? That is a Big Signifying Event that your toddler is actually he not she!* You don't tick all the boxes on that checklist? Why then it's not that you are a woman who isn't stereotypically girly and pink, it's that you are really deep down inside a man!

Sweet Home Alabama.

*Seriously, that woman. A Credentialed Expert In The Science Is Settled who we bigots should listen to and learn from. A one year old child who doesn't even know the word for "dress", who has no idea of what culture they are living in and if men wear robes in that culture, a one year old child wants to unsnap their onesie to make a "flowing dress"† to indicate that they are transgender. This is who was writing policy for the likes of WPATH.

†Clearly all these ladies are transgender, can you not see their flowing dresses?

It's the "somewhat obsessive way" part that makes it more of a disorder than just an interest in areas forbidden to their gender.

But, when this group grew up with therapy to both accept that they liked these stereotypical girly things but that didn't make them a girl, and to slowly expose them to more masculine pursuits, the vast majority just realized they were gay men by adulthood. The 20% who still felt like the opposite sex I feel bad for, there might be something genuinely wrong with them.

Agreeing with your point about adolescents, honestly I never understood the argument for delaying puberty. That's one of the crucial times of sex differentiation where someone is really developing into a mature man or woman, from hormones to physical changes to all the rest of it. How in the world can someone say "they don't feel like a male" when they're not done developing all the way? I don't see how it's helpful to delay this process to, I guess, "give them time to figure it out". You're literally denying them information and the opportunity for self-discovery. For a lot of people, puberty just sucks, but that doesn't mean they're transgender.

I think the part you don't understand about the argument - because it's hidden, even from the arguers themselves - is that the argument rests on a fundamental belief in dualism. That is, that a person has a soul that is some gender or another, which is only accessible to the person's mind and, as such, they are whatever gender that they believe they are. This form of argument was taken from the successful fight for gay marriage around the late 00s/early 10s, where it was deemed that gay people were "born that way," and as such, e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now. This, of course, also rested on a fundamental belief in dualism.

This is also why one common trans activist point of agreement is that babies can be trans before they're even verbal, which can be detected by their parents carefully observing their behaviors, a la facilitated communication. Interestingly, the belief in dualism and maximum autonomy also results in push for what seem like the complete opposite, that someone can change their gender at will, since their gender is entirely and only determined by the person's opinion.

So when a prepubescent person is confused about their gender identity, this isn't the result of them simply not having enough experience in life, or of them not having knowledge of what being a man or woman is like, or of them having been exposed constantly to social messaging about transness; it's necessarily only the result of their eternal soul expressing themselves in the truest, most genuine, real form. As such, denying them the ability to get on puberty blockers in order to transition their biology before their actual sex's puberty causes biological changes to them is cruelty. Furthermore, if they actually go through their natural puberty, they might believe that they "grew out" of their innate transness, which means one less trans person than there otherwise would have been, which is one of many forms that "trans genocide" takes place.

e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.

How often does this happen?

Furthermore, if they actually go through their natural puberty, they might believe that they "grew out" of their innate transness, which means one less trans person than there otherwise would have been, which is one of many forms that "trans genocide" takes place.

No, the concern is that (1) being treated as the wrong gender is extremely unpleasant, and the sooner it ends, the better, and (2) transitioning later will make it more difficult to pass. I don't think trans people think people deciding they're cis after all is bad in any way. Some might believe it never happens, but for those who accept that it does, I don't think they consider it "trans genocide". Claims of "trans genocide" focus on alleged actual killings of trans people.

  • -11

How often does this happen?

Who knows? Doesn't matter, according to the "born this way" metaphysics of homosexuality.

Claims of "trans genocide" focus on alleged actual killings of trans people.

They focus on that, certainly, but focus doesn't mean exclusivity. Another common claim of "trans genocide" is that any microaggression against a trans person could be the marginal straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back that pushes them to suicide (which is famously common among trans people). And certainly, yet another is the but-for reduction of trans people by not allowing youths to transition. Which is why, e.g. pushes against "Drag Queen Story Hour" and similar activities have been labeled as part of "trans genocide" - the reasoning being that, if you don't normalize subversive gender expression like that among children, there will likely be at least some of them who would have discovered their innate transness but never did to due to not encountering such subversions, which reduces the population of trans people.

Who knows? Doesn't matter, according to the "born this way" metaphysics of homosexuality.

It doesn't make sense to complain about some bad thing your opponents caused if it never actually happens. I find it most implausible that someone should have "years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret" and then come out as gay.

Which is why, e.g. pushes against "Drag Queen Story Hour" and similar activities have been labeled as part of "trans genocide" - the reasoning being that, if you don't normalize subversive gender expression like that among children, there will likely be at least some of them who would have discovered their innate transness but never did to due to not encountering such subversions, which reduces the population of trans people.

With all due respect, this suggests to me that you don't actually understand the other side very well. Trans activists, drag queens, and associated people draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens. It is mostly anti-trans people who conflate the two.

It doesn't make sense to complain about some bad thing your opponents caused if it never actually happens. I find it most implausible that someone should have "years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret" and then come out as gay.

Who's complaining? Please point out to me where in my:

e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.

implies in any way that this is a bad thing or that I'm complaining about it.

With all due respect, this suggests to me that you don't actually understand the other side very well. Trans activists, drag queens, and associated people draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens. It is mostly anti-trans people who conflate the two.

With all due respect, this suggests to me that you haven't actually spoken to people on your "side" (an aside: what an ugly word to use in this sort of conversation). I'm basing this on actual conversations I had with actual trans activists who I was on the same "side" as all the way through around early 2020s. I used to be an intersectional feminist (still a feminist today, just not that kind) who was very much on the entire "break down all social norms and queer everything" train (heh) up to that point and know for a fact that, yes, trans activists do draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens, but they certainly see the normalization of the latter as a good tool for normalizing the former, via attacking heteronormativity and opening up people's minds to the possibilities of human expression and sexuality and etc. that are being suppressed by our current oppressive system. My comment did not, in any way, conflate trans women with drag queens, nor did my comment imply such as a base assumption.

Who's complaining? Please point out to me where in my:

e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.

implies in any way that this is a bad thing or that I'm complaining about it.

The tone of the entire paragraph certainly suggests that you disagree with what you have dubbed "dualism".

I'm basing this on actual conversations I had with actual trans activists who I was on the same "side" as all the way through around early 2020s. I used to be an intersectional feminist (still a feminist today, just not that kind) who was very much on the entire "break down all social norms and queer everything" train (heh) up to that point

If you don't mind sharing, what made you change your mind?

and know for a fact that, yes, trans activists do draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens, but they certainly see the normalization of the latter as a good tool for normalizing the former, via attacking heteronormativity and opening up people's minds to the possibilities of human expression and sexuality and etc. that are being suppressed by our current oppressive system.

I'll have to concede on this, as I am not personally involved in activist circles and am not privy to this kind of strategizing.

More comments

Claims of "trans genocide" focus on alleged actual killings of trans people.

They do not. Consider a representative example, which claims that bathroom bills, laws requiring people to compete in sports corresponding to their sex and elevated risk of suicide for trans people are all part of the "trans genocide" currently ongoing in the US.

Or consider the Wikipedia page about the concept (of course it has a Wikipedia page). Opening paragraph:

Transgender genocide or trans genocide (also transgendercide) is a term used by some scholars and activists to describe the targeting of transgender people as part of wider genocides, as well as describe an elevated level of erasure, systematic discrimination, and violence against transgender people.

By their own admission, trans activists consider the "erasure" of trans people (i.e. failing to affirm them and refer to them by the names and pronouns they wish to be addressed by; refusing to make every other character in a teen drama trans) and "discrimination" against them (i.e. demanding that they be housed in the prisons and hospitals corresponding to their sex; lesbians refusing to have sex with male people who "identify as" women) to be examples of "genocide". They also consider the elevated risk of suicide trans people face as an example of "genocide" i.e. the transgender genocide might be the world's first self-administered genocide. Sui-genocide? Geno-suicide?

Sterilization that is forced upon transgender people in order to obtain legal recognition is characterized by various researchers, including political theorist Anna Carastathis, as a violation of reproductive rights, eugenic, and genocidal.

Some countries make a gender recognition cert conditional on having undergone bottom surgery. This argument is sort of ridiculous because a) no one is forcing you to cut your dick off: if changing the sex on your birth cert is that important to you, that's a you problem; and b) unlike ethnicity, trans identification isn't hereditary.

You'll note that there's a bit of a Morton's fork here, as elsewhere in the article they claim that banning bottom surgery for minors constitutes "genocide". If you stop a trans person getting bottom surgery, that's genocide. If you say that a trans person can change the sex marker on their driver's license only if they get bottom surgery (in order to weed out bad actors), that's also genocide. As near as I can tell it, transgender genocide is just when you don't let trans people do exactly what they want 100% of the time.

Elsewhere in the article, there's a map of the US showing which states have banned gender-affirming care. You'll notice that this has absolutely nothing to do with "actual killings of trans people". The page argues that these laws meet certain criteria mentioned in the United Nations definition of genocide, as they "[cause] serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately [inflict] on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". But this is assuming the conclusion: a major reason for these bans is because of researchers like Hilary Cass investigating and learning that the evidence base for the efficacy of these interventions is appallingly weak and poor quality. This whole discussion was started by you pointing out that some children's mental health worsens after they undergo gender-affirming care. If this is true in general, it implies that legalising gender-affirming care for minors constitutes "transgender genocide"!

Sue E. Spivey and Christine Robinson have argued that the ex-gay movement, which encourages transgender as well as other LGBTQ people to renounce their identities, advocates social death and therefore could meet some legal definitions of genocide.

In other words, if people stop identifying as trans, there will be no trans people left and hence trans people will have been (metaphorically) exterminated. (Note the popular slogan "death before detransition".) Again – absolutely nothing to do with "actual killings of trans people". If everyone stopped identifying as trans tomorrow, there would be no trans people left, without anyone actually having been killed. Nobody identifies as a mod or a rocker anymore, and yet it would be absurd to claim that mods or rockers have been "genocided".

Leah Owen highlights how far-right groups in the U.S. have been incorporating anti-transgender rhetoric and ideas, and the attempts at the time of writing that sought to eradicate transgender people through "broader cultural/legal/social action" rather than direct extermination.

There you go. When they talk about "transgender genocide", they are not talking about trans people being murdered.

I could go on and fisk the rest of the article in detail, but I think I've made my point. Only a small portion of the Wikipedia article about "transgender genocide" concerns itself with trans people actually being murdered.* The rest of it is just complaining about trans people being made to use the public facilities concordant with their sex, not being permitted to compete in opposite-sex sporting events, certain trans people no longer identifying as trans, medical bodies hitting pause on gender-affirming care for minors and so on. When you hear "transgender genocide", instead of thinking "trans people being murdered in their hundreds" you should hear "trans people being inconvenienced or failing to get exactly what they want, in any way".

Between this and Gaza, I'm starting to think the word "genocide" will need to be retired pretty soon.

*The article is 15,451 words long. "Murder" appears 15 times, "kill" 13 times, "violence" 38 times, "death" 9 times and so on.

Both the Substack article and the Wikipedia article seem to be suggesting that all this is merely the prelude to mass killings, along the lines of the ten stages of genocide. The Wikipedia article, being a page on a wiki, is admittedly less coherent.

  • -10

And you'll notice that hypothetical mass killings of trans people are very much not actual killings of trans people.

I don't even concede that there are hypothetical mass killings. If criticism of a group (even based on malicious falsehoods) is a prelude to them being mass killed, then Kiwi Farms users are about to be genocided. So is everyone on The Motte.

More comments

I dislike the "trans genocide" terminology, but I'm kind of stuck on a better word that doesn't minimize the concerns. Attempts to extinguish belief systems by any means necessary up to and including forced conversion and outlawing specific rites are a well-attested historical phenomenon which seems like it'd make a better analogy, but I don't believe that idea has a more specific name than the somewhat broader umbrella of "religious persecution".

Technically, "persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined [to include only male and female], or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law" (defined as "intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of identity") does count as a crime against humanity, even though in common parlance it does not sound so weighty.

There should really a better way to encapsulate the specific idea "people are trying to make there not be any Xs anymore" as distinct from just "people are systematically mistreating Xs"; many groups are persecuted without their enemies' aim being to extinguish the relevant identity altogether. Trivially, that UN definition you quote conceives of itself as applying to gender-based "persecution", and it would be… surprising for any government to set itself the goal of actually erasing women from the Earth (even in the non-murder-based sense of trying to forcibly transition all women into trans men), so they can't intend that "persecute" should be understood as implying an intent to destroy.

More comments

Well, at least you're acknowledging that a new religious movement is what trans is.

"Genocide" is obviously the wrong word because genocide means targeting an ethnic group for extermination, and trans people aren't an ethnic group. Over time, a religious order can become a distinct ethnic group provided they only marry each other (you'd be amazed how often I have to explain to people that the Holocaust was not an example of religious persecution, as the Nazis targeted anyone of the Jewish ethnicity, regardless of whether they were practising or were even aware of their heritage), but I don't get the impression that this description is likely to apply to trans people any time soon. Sure, members of the Blue Tribe tend to endorse gender ideology and tend to intermarry, but most people who endorse gender ideology are not themselves trans. And as a result of the medical interventions they've undergone, trans people are disproportionately likely to be unable to have children anyway.

If (as you more or less concede) taking HRT and puberty blockers is more akin to a holy sacrament than anything we think of as medical care in the ordinary sense of the term, and if top/bottom surgery are more similar to elective surgical procedures done as part of induction into a tribe (analogous to circumcision or FGM), then in my eyes this strengthens rather than weakens the case for banning these interventions for children. If communion wafers wreaked the changes on children's bodies that HRT does, I'd be in favour of banning them too. Many jurisdictions already ban FGM for teenage girls. I'm aware that this practice is closely affiliated with certain strands of the Islamic faith and hence trying to prevent it could be thought of as "religious persecution": I just don't care. Religion or no, you shouldn't cut off bits of teenage girls' genitals when not medically indicated, and a pluralistic society has to drawn the line somewhere. I haven't been circumcised, but if circumcision were to be banned outright in all Western countries I'd be delighted. I'm sure there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from these countries' Muslim and Jewish communities, but this is one case where even an outspoken philosemite such as myself would say "tough".

Well, at least you're acknowledging that a new religious movement is what trans is.

Not exactly, but I do concede that it's a belief system - and as a liberal atheist I believe belief systems should get the same kinds of legal protection whether or not they're grounded in supernatural beliefs, as historical belief systems tended to be. Persecuting Daoists or Buddhists for their beliefs continues to be wrong even if we're simply talking about their moral or philosophical beliefs rather than anything properly theological. I feel the same logic should apply to Transgenderism - and Vegetarianism, and Effective Altruism, etc.

(…) then in my eyes this strengthens rather than weakens the case for banning these interventions for children.

I wholeheartedly agree - about FGM, male circumcision, and medical transition for children. Physical alterations to children has always been the one point where I diverge from the progressive consensus re: trans issues, though it puts me into quite a lonely place politically - my belief is that in an ideal world, children should be allowed to socially transition, but barred from making permanent changes to their bodies just yet, and this is something both sides view as unacceptable from opposite directions.

(Now, mind, I do think that there's something of the isolated demand for rigor to the scrutiny applied to transitioning children. There are a lot of other alterations to children's bodies that are currently kosher, from getting a girl's ears pierced to so-called-"corrective" genital surgery on intersex infants. I tend not to find that much common ground with a lot of anti-child-transition campaigners due to them not caring about those things, never mind their views on adult transition, which are rarely congruent with mine. But I'm leaving this as a parenthetical here, insofar as given your stated position on circumcision I think you might actually be ideologically consistent on this kind of stuff.)

More comments

The problem is of course the US doesn't ban people making medical decisions for their kids based on religous belief generally. You can get your kid circumcised, or choose not to treat them and use prayer instead, or increase risk by not using blood products and so on. Up until imminent death, when the state may intervene.

So in a "your rules applied fairly" sense, if Trans ideology is a religion, that indicates parents who support their kids transitioning should be allowed to make that choice for them.

Otherwise its an isolated demand for rigor. My unsubstantiated belief can inform medical care and risk the life of my child, your unsubstantiated belief cannot.

Even the social contagion issue, churches have specific super-spreader events to infect children with their social contagion.

So i'm not sure treating trans ideology as a religion helps because we give huge amounts of latitude to religion.

Which is basically my stance, while we allow parents to do all kinds of crazy nonsense to their children, drawing the line at trans stuff is an isolated demand for rigor. My preferred choice would be to ban the lot of it, but thats highly unlikely so "your rules fairly applied" it is.

If Bob gets to mutilate his kids penis, and Carol gets to mutilate her kids mind, and Shemar gets to risk his kids life when they need a blood transfusion, and Marjorie gets to risk her kids life by replacing medical treatment with prayer, then Freddie gets to transition his son to his daughter.

Many of those will turn out to be awful harmful choices and terrible for the kid. But we allow them anyway.

Either unsubstantiated beliefs get to influence medical decisions or they don't. And currently many, many of them do.

If trans is a religion then at very minimum where parents want to transition their kid they should be allowed to do so. Even if all evidence suggests its nonsense. Because evidence suggests thats for a whole host of nonsense we do allow.

"Such legal exemptions in Idaho and other states mean, for example, that if a parent withholds medical treatments for an ailing child and instead opts for spiritual treatment through prayer, the child will not be considered "neglected" under the law, even if he or she dies."

If your beliefs can legally allow you to let your child die, its hard to argue they shouldn't also let you transition them.

Arguably trans activists pivoting to calling it a religion would entitle them to more protections, at least in the US.

More comments

The steelman is that the internal experience of puberty is supposed to be extremely unpleasant for trans people, and the later stages makes later transition much harder.

The 'very unpleasant' bit is more obvious for FtMs -- menses isn't fun for anyone and I'd assume it feels worse if the whole 'this is an alien thing rolling in my belly' sensation never goes away, breasts have obvious social impact and also just kinda suck from back pain and bras perspective to the point, and even in the modern day there's an absolute fuck-ton of social threat stuff a lot of young women suddenly get thrown at them. But the guy side isn't great, either: acne, cracking voice, more acne, your junk getting a mind of its own, and a lot of the things that make up for it for normal guys are actively unappealing for MtFs.

The transition bit is... the ugly paradox. Trans people really don't like to think about how it can be harder for some people to pass, no matter how much effort they put into it, but it's a thing, they know it's a thing, and there's a lot of tactical decision-making about how it's a thing. Both as a "I wish I had" moment, because a lot of trans activists only transitioned later in life, and because a there's a variety of pragmatic effects downstream of transition by physics and by law. The MtF who's six-foot-six, has a prominent Adam's apple, body hair everywhere, and enough upper arm strength to bench press a swimming team is going to have a lot more expensive, painful, longer-lasting surgical intervention just to pass to someone with poor gender recognition from thirty feet away. An FtM who has to get bras special-ordered and spent five years with the habits downstream of that isn't going to mode-switch into how cis guys act quickly, if ever.

The theory was that if someone's staying consistent in gender presentation for a year or two, you could be a lot more confident that they're not going to desist and get them to an age range where knowing consent is more realistic.

I think the trans movement badly over-corrected here, both in how early they started using puberty blockers (to the point where it made healthy life after transition more difficult), how long they used them, and by neglecting the amount of information people do pick up from early puberty. But while the former has a lot of problems downstream of bad practices by advocacy groups and active obfuscation by doctors of negative results, the latter is a more reasonable mistake. The numbers, even by social conservative expectations, had youth desistance just pretty damned rare. That was figmentary -- until 2020ish, prepuberty gender weirdness just wasn't be recorded much at all -- but it wasn't just hopes and dreams, either.

The basic issue with most trans studies is you'd need a control group of people who qualify for transition but are not allowed to (or are given placebo hormones but that wouldn't work cause hormones have pretty noticeable physical and emotional effects). Also you can't really isolate 'gender transition' as a mental health treatment separate from social treatment of transgender people which varies wildly based on social context. If everyone who got prozac had to wear a giant "I take prozac" hat all the time and some social circles considered taking prozac worthy of a social penalty ranging from mockery and derision to outright abuse, it would make it way harder to measure the effects of prozac.

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

Whoa there, slow down before accusing my lying eyes of deceiving me. As far as I can see, both IRL and online, it's most decidedly the pro-trans side that's most vocal and active about promoting its views, not in the least because in many places opposition to that view is flat-out not permitted. Maybe American mainstream television and newspapers are an exception to this - I wouldn't know, not consuming them - but online anywhere other than on the Motte and IRL in Germany it doesn't hold at all. Pro-trans activists are everywhere, anti-trans activists are in hiding because to voice their opinions in public will get them ostracized.

I think your perception is skewed. For one, the most powerful person in the world, elected by a majority of American voters, is anti-trans.

  • -12

Surely that example deserves an asterisk. It was one bulwark breached in a 'hostile takeover' by a man who could survive based on his Fuck You money, and is mostly notable for being a continued exception to the dominant speech norms solely due to the way it bypassed the entrenched network effects.

This is not symmetry.

In fact, all three of the most powerful anti-trans people I can think of fit that mold (Musk and Rowling being the other two)

Trump was asked which bathrooms transwomen would need to use in Trump Tower. He said he didn't care. It is not obvious to me he is anti-trans. Unless you define it very broadly to the point that the typical American is "anti-trans" in some "they should be in women's combat sports or prisons" sense.

I'm finding sources from 2016 for your claim. Maybe you haven't been following the news, but in his second term Trump has enacted all sorts of executive orders restricting trans people in various ways.

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.

The problem is we were told for years and years and years that any mental health issue or depression a trans person (and all LGBTs by extension) was facing can be squarely pinned on "minority stress". In other words, the majority should un-bigot themselves and stop punishing victimless acts. Fair enough. But the expectations departed from "stop commenting or interfering in people's personal lives" and segued to "how dare you not care, do you know silence is VIOLENCE, indifference is p-word" (the p-word being privilege, original sin of woke morality). I am a straight man, not religious, I don't care if a man I'll never meet marries another man. But the thought of a man sticking his hairy dick inside another man's hairy poop-chute is just a disgusting fetish to me, even if I'm polite enough to not say it out loud. I also believe sex and gender are the same thing, edge cases notwithstanding. I believe all transgenders are mentally ill and their delusions are encouraged only by algorithm, but I'm polite enough to keep that bit to myself. I don't really care if an adult man chooses to mutilate his own genitals, even if suicide was a 100% guaranteed outcome of transitioning.

But I absolutely do not want any kind of LGBT education in schools. I'll go further, if I could reliably diagnose an "LGBT marker" in my unborn child, I would want to abort it.

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

Please, let's not make this a decibel contest. There are no objective metrics or units of measurement to quantify which side is "louder and more annoying", even if I should agree to points being awarded for silence. Now who you find louder is heavily filtered by:

  • where you spend your time online and IRL
  • what your algorithms push
  • who legacy media, academia, corporations and government tilt in favour of
  • good ole selection bias (you notice and remember what offends you most)

Every tribe experiences the other side as overwhelmingly loud and aggressive while viewing their own side as reasonable pushback. Look how DEI threads go in Star Wars and gaming forums. When you point out "why should Luke Skywalker and his bloodline be sacrificial lamb to uplift no-name girbloss", you get responses like "ugh every single time... dude why do you care? Stop making everything political!" from the other side, after they succeeded in having their way after years of complaining and outraging, the things they accuse you of. But it's always a cope deployed when the previously dominant narrative starts facing serious resistance. In any hotly contested issue, both sides amplify what serves them. The side with institutional capture tends to be louder in legacy channels. The dissident side tends to be louder and cruder where it actually has open space. I'll be more honest though. I am super anti-woke, I'm well aware many anti-wokes engage in behaviour I'd find insufferable were it directed at me. But I don't care, because I still agree with their objectives and heavily dislike woketopia.

How do you expect me to not pay attention and also put on performative enthusiasm for pride parades and pride month every year? If your sexual preferences and gender identity should not matter, why can't I just ignore you? If they should matter, why should I not get upset about pinkwashing legacy straight-male oriented media? I am fine with you living your life as you please, but why do I have to celebrate your perceived identity and fetishes? Why are you looking around the room to see who stops clapping first? Why are you expecting me to watch Brokeback Mountain as a media literacy test? Because it's cinematically artful? The raw emotional acting? Or because it's an important progressive conversation? To me, it's just Oscar bait gayslop. I'd rather watch a poor man's Fast & Furious for 12 hours. Everyone gets aggressive if you breach their red lines.

Why are you expecting me to watch Brokeback Mountain as a media literacy test?

I was at Chicago's Navy Pier the other day and the theater there was showing ads for a play of Brokeback Mountain.

How do you expect me to not pay attention and also put on performative enthusiasm for pride parades and pride month every year? If your sexual preferences and gender identity should not matter, why can't I just ignore you? If they should matter, why should I not get upset about pinkwashing legacy straight-male oriented media? I am fine with you living your life as you please, but why do I have to celebrate your perceived identity and fetishes? Why are you looking around the room to see who stops clapping first? Why are you expecting me to watch Brokeback Mountain as a media literacy test? Because it's cinematically artful? The raw emotional acting? Or because it's an important progressive conversation? To me, it's just Oscar bait gayslop. I'd rather watch a poor man's Fast & Furious for 12 hours. Everyone gets aggressive if you breach their red lines.

This is a strawman. The vast majority of cishet people don't care about pride and don't participate in any way, and they receive zero pushback unless they go looking for it in the depths of Tumblr. Who, exactly, expects you to watch Brokeback Mountain?

Nearly every major company, from banks to tech giants to consumer brands, performs the annual pride month ritual of slapping the rainbow flag on their social media, homepages, and marketing. Pro-LGBT content is ambient, institutionally enforced, and aggressively pushed into the public square whether you’re looking for it or not. Just try offering the mildest pushback, “I don’t care about this, keep it in your bedroom, I don’t want it in my face constantly”, and brace yourself for a barrage of HR scare words. As for Brokeback Mountain, let's say it bombed. The entire pop culture media apparatus would have blamed “bigoted audiences” for failing to show up enthusiastically enough for this raw emotional (homosexual) experience, and the failure would be clear proof that society is still full of regressive deplorables who need re-education.

Nearly every major company, from banks to tech giants to consumer brands, performs the annual pride month ritual of slapping the rainbow flag on their social media, homepages, and marketing. Pro-LGBT content is ambient, institutionally enforced, and aggressively pushed into the public square whether you’re looking for it or not. Just try offering the mildest pushback, “I don’t care about this, keep it in your bedroom, I don’t want it in my face constantly”, and brace yourself for a barrage of HR scare words.

So just ignore it? You claimed you were being forced to actively participate. Now you're down to "it exists and and I am aware of it".

As for Brokeback Mountain, let's say it bombed. The entire cultural apparatus would have blamed “bigoted audiences” for failing to show up enthusiastically enough for this raw emotional (homosexual) experience, and the failure would be clear proof that society is still full of deplorables who need re-education.

Now you're just making things up.

Speaking from the anti-trans (as it would be represented) side, I think we really don't have enough established about existing mental health conditions and co-morbidities. I don't believe a two year old has a firm and unyielding grasp of their innate gender, such that parents and school should start socially transitioning their toddlers. I think puberty is a very stressful time of upheaval and change, in even a body horror type of fashion: suddenly all these changes, with no consent, knowledge or will of your own, and you don't know from day to day what the next alteration will be, and now these changes thrust upon you make the people around you behave differently and put a whole set of new expectations and limits on you. Add in any alienation from feeling you don't fit in and don't fit the pattern of what a girl or boy "should" be, and that's without even "are you indeed on the autism spectrum or have other problems?" and the rainbow pixie dust hugboxes online telling you that you are a Real Girl or Real Boy and that will solve everything!

I found puberty very tough. I felt boys had it easier. Thank God this was long before the days of the genderbread person or unicorn in every primary school classroom and people eager to urge on "of course you are a boy, why you don't have traditional girl interests and you like boy stuff, you need to become Chauncey and then everything will be marvellous and of course we'll work on your parents about do they want a dead child or a live one? leave it to us!"

All that being said: are there real trans people? Yeah, I'll accept that. Are the most egregious cases we see demanding publicity and special treatment really trans? I kind of doubt it, and I wish we could honestly and coolly look at cases such as "elderly murderer who already killed two women is now trans and declaring 'she' should be in women's prison" without the hysteria on both sides. But we're far, far from that.

I found puberty very tough. I felt boys had it easier.

I've found this to be generally true, to the point where someone describing puberty as a scary experience is generally a strong tell for me that the commenter is female. For me (and I assume most boys) the "worst" issues with puberty were (in no particular order):

  1. Voice changing/cracking
  2. Constant aching from growth spurts
  3. Acne
  4. Constant no-reason (and yes-reason) boners (probably the only "negative" part I miss, now that I have the joy of prostate issues to deal with)

Otherwise, for most boys puberty means getting taller, stronger, and faster. It means being able to grow facial hair (though it can look pretty pathetic initially, I wasn't able to grow a proper beard until my late teens/early 20's). It means finally being allowed to do more "grown-up" things (kids are retarded and don't realize that being a grown-up sucks).

For women I can absolutely see things like 3 to 5 days of pain and bleeding every month as being a horrible experience. But my brain can't relate to the horror I've heard some women express at developing breasts and similar features though, I just don't understand that one.

Apart from the physical changes, what I found difficult were the new set of constraints. Things I had been able to do before, now I couldn't do because "only boys do that/you're a young lady now" and no adequate, so far as I could see, reason for that. So I did grump about "can't do this, can't do that, I could if I were a boy".

As I say, being born too early for social experimentation saved me.

But my brain can't relate to the horror I've heard some women express at developing breasts and similar features though, I just don't understand that one.

Anecdotes are not data, but first - if you're not sexually attracted to women, then "oooh lady bits!" is not an arousing experience for you 😁 Second, just going by my own experience, suddenly I had these growing lumps on my chest, and now I had to get a whole new set of garments (bras) to manage them, and now it was important that I manage them, because modesty and all the rest of it, as well as attracting male attention. And I was eleven, which was way earlier than my mother expected me to start puberty, so she had told me nothing (in the opinion that she had time yet to sit me down and give me The Talk and do all the explaining; this was in the days when sources of information were "the dictionary" and "the encyclopaedia" if you had a set in the house so not much luck for me trying to make sense of all this on my own).

Boys have always had penis and testicles, imagine if you didn't but now suddenly things were growing out of areas that previously had nothing there!

A good half of these do seem to be talking about "socially constructed" constraints, which does lead me back to wondering how much the possibility of transitioning has taken the wind out of the sails of any push to relax or change the gender-role expectations of women. (I have seen some people in the 4channy corners of the internet throw around the term "tomboy genocide".) Of course, if you are sufficiently culturally conservative (and if I remember correctly, you were...?) you might not have been sympathetic to that push either, in which case... do you just think of those constraints as something like women's rightful cross to bear?

Boys have always had penis and testicles, imagine if you didn't but now suddenly things were growing out of areas that previously had nothing there!

To be fair, the prepubescent form of those organs is nothing like what they turn into later. I do distinctly remember the feeling when I saw a grown man naked for the first time, which was disgust followed by a mild sprinkling of existential horror that I may soon look like that as well.

Testosterone, I think, does really disfigure humans in a way that has no equivalent counterpart in women (which is why men and women both easily agree that women are by default prettier/cuter); and it is only due to significant, though generally very effective, psychological conditioning that we learn to deny this. The conditioning does not always take a hold on boys before the changes actually start kicking in.

A good half of these do seem to be talking about "socially constructed" constraints, which does lead me back to wondering how much the possibility of transitioning has taken the wind out of the sails of any push to relax or change the gender-role expectations of women

It's a common complaint and one I take seriously, but at the risk of sounding like the "we need more Stalins" guy, that failure mode seems to be the province of moderate trans activists, of normie Blues who sort of support the general idea of transition and mouth the right slogans, but are probably a couple of decades behind on the philosophy. In online spaces that skew younger and leftier, your Tumblrs and Blueskies, people love nothing more than to validate trans women's right to be masculine or trans men's right to be feminine. Real trans activists love themselves a MTF butch lesbian who rounds back to using he/him pronouns with three nested layers of irony, and accordingly, would strongly oppose the idea that a girl not conforming with gender norms must mean that she's secretly a trans boy.

Things I had been able to do before, now I couldn't do because "only boys do that/you're a young lady now" and no adequate, so far as I could see, reason for that.

Horseshoe theory is real. Both the extreme left and the extreme right believe in rigid gender roles. These activities, interests, and traits are MALE, these activities, interests and traits are FEMALE. If you do the first you are MALE. If you do the second you are FEMALE. If you like both then you are BOTH/NEITHER/WEIRD.

The main difference is that the the extreme right demands your activities, interests, and traits change to fit your gender, while the extreme left demands your gender change to fit your personality. The reason so many people go from radically right households to become radical leftists is because you don't have to change your structure of how gender roles ought to work, just whether it's possible/good to change sides. There's less inferential distance to get from one extreme to the other than there is to become a moderate who believes in letting people be themselves without getting all obsessed about Identities.

I really liked having bigger genitals, chest hair, etc. I thought the first few whiskers were the awesomest thing ever, even though I had to start shaving. I liked the changes in facial structure, too.

I’m willing to admit these weren’t totally equivalent, but secondary sex characteristics were awesome, except for the part where my underwear now fit awkwardly.

I think there’s a continuum of a sort of “dysphoria” with, on one end. people mildly uncomfortable with their sexual characteristics but able to eventually get used it, and on the other, people that never get over it and need to find drastic measures to cope (transitioning, joining a monastery, maybe extreme BDSM fantasies).

For me from the male side it also felt like terrifying, complete body horror, although probably more psychological apart from the sensory nightmare of growing hair everywhere (thank goodness for laser hair removal). Developing sexual attraction the way I did felt like I had a brain tumour, and that I was sexually assaulting myself every time my libido would make itself known. I think I would have joined an order of ascetic monks if I had lived long enough ago.

now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists)

what other causes can so thoroughly be blamed on The Enemy?

very postmodern dao, the enemy of thing is solely responsible for thing.

Yeah, that little dig sticks out as being the most narrative-over-reality. I distinctly remember Trans being pushed as the new demanded-empathy super-stimulus that every BPD person I knew was torn up about way back in 2012. Back then it wasn't even about encouraging people to be trans, it was "LOOK at these POOR people TRAPPED in the WRONG body" with much beating of chests and tearing at shawls in sympathy.

It's amazing how you can bootstrap a social movement by this method; suddenly every alt girl reacted to the R-word or mis-pronoun-ing the way a 20something beardy arab guy reacts to disrespect towards the Prophet, or an Italian guy reacts to something said about his mother by someone who has never met his mother.

How does this even work? Are Trans people only stopped from passing seamlessly due to anti-trans activists?

The way I understood the argument, it goes like this: the more chuds (chud, def.: the opposite of woke) hate something publicly, the more wokes are inclined to be that thing out of contrarianism. This also works the other way around, see: the hypersensitivity of chuds to even the slightest depiction of woke values in media (such as when female character is not white blonde bombshell with exposed D cups).

Thus, making anti-transness your personality as an opinion maker online means more young people who already disliked your memeplex identify as trans.

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".

Not according to Google Trends. The bathroom bill passed in March 2016. In the US, searches for "Transsexual" peaked in January 2006, searches for "Transgender" peaked in February and September 2025, and searches for "transgender" peaked in July 2015 and May 2016. Searches for "Caitlyn Jenner" and "Laverne Cox" both peaked in June 2015 (Jenner publicly came out in April 2015). Searches for "I am Jazz" and "Jazz Jennings" peaked in July 2015. The idea that people only started talking about transgender issues because of anti-trans activism is baseless.

I also feel compelled to quote from the most popular thing I've ever written:

In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.

As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 40 separate days in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”).

It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say "umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol" when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.

This is a silly complaint in many ways.

1: It's easy to make up as many unofficial days as you want.

For example I just asked AI real quick about June and got

Men's Health Month, Alzheimer's and Brain Awareness Month, PTSD Awareness Month, Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, Scleroderma Awareness Month, National Safety Month, Immigrant Heritage Month, Caribbean American Heritage Month, Black Music Month, Great Outdoors Month, Food-Related Months, National Dairy Month, National Candy Month, National Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Month, Turkey Lovers Month, Iced Tea Month, National Camping Month, National Rivers Month, Rose Month, National Homeownership Month, National Employee Wellness Month, Effective Communications Month, Fight the Filthy Fly Month, Accordion Awareness Month, Candy Month, Zoo and Aquarium Month

And that's just a small portion. Most of those things are not actually observed in any meaningful way. November is not seen as "trans awareness month", I've never seen any LGBT community talking about that ever. In fact I asked what type of month November is considered and it gave me the five of Native American Heritage Month, Veterans and Military Families Month, National Family Caregivers Month, National Adoption Month, and Movember so presumably those, which I've never heard of once, are more prominent.

And it's not even on the national calendar day site. so seemingly something like National Tar Syndrome Awareness Month is still more cared about than "trans awareness month" is.

2: By the same standards, black related days have been drastically undercounted. Such as June also being Black Music Month! Or August as Black Business Month. And speaking of November, it's also National Black Catholic History Month. And don't forget about National Black Family Day or Black Women's Equal Pay Day or whatever else.

  • -15

November is not seen as "trans awareness month", I've never seen any LGBT community talking about that ever.

Give me a break. That's not true.

You've been posting a constant stream of things that seem to defend libertarianism but which are either extreme, subtly wrong, or both, which is a classic trolling technique that is the equivalent of being a fed: post this material in the hope that you can provoke some of your enemies into agreeing with or defending the claims (if extreme) or into believing them (if wrong).

[Edit: Or to provoke your enemies into giving broader than necessary refutations of the things you say, so as to get them to attack libertarianism.]

Unfortunately the moderators don't seem to understand this, even though it violates the rule "speak plainly".

You think he's aware of everything on the San Francisco public calendar? I live in Pittsburgh and I'm unaware of half the events on the public calendar, which, by the way, did not include a single one related to Transgender Awareness Month. At the very least, nothing required any streets to be shut down, and that's much more visibility than some press release or statement from the mayor that nobody is going to read.

Finding out that there exists a LGBT community talking about that would take five seconds of Googling. (Notice that he did take the time to ask an AI, but he was willing to post that because the results were more convenient for him.)

He did not claim that there was no LGBT community that observed it; he claimed that he had never personally encountered a LGBT community that does. If I want to prove that leopards are not commonly kept as pets in America, that leopard-keeping is a fringe practice, I can say "I've never seen any American with a pet leopard". I'm sure if I Googled it I could find counterexamples, but that would be besides the point, which would be to use "have I organically encountered X in my day-to-day life" as a Bayesian proxy for "how common is X".

Never having personally encountered it still requires not having Googled it, yet being willing to use AI on it. And I don't believe for a moment that he actually used AI but failed to Google it.

It doesn't matter anyway. I never said no one has ever talked about it or mentioned it. I said that it's not observed in any meaningful way. A single acknowledgement from the San Francisco government about it is not a meaningful observation.

From pretty much any meaningful criteria, black music month is far more observed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Music_Appreciation_Month

It was initiated as Black Music Month by President Jimmy Carter, who, on June 7, 1979, decreed that June would be the month of Black music.[1] After the announcement by Carter, the bill finally passed in 2000 when activist Dyana Williams' 10 years of effort persuaded Congress

This is officially recognized by Congress and created by a then sitting president. Any criteria that includes "trans awareness month" and not Black Music Month is stupid. Like this doesn't even have room for smart debate, it is the most official one by far. And black music month is still at the bottom of the barrel barely scraping by "meaningful observation".

Give me a break. That's not true.

One random thing from San Francisco is not evidence of it being actually widely observed. It doesn't even have a wikipedia page! TDOV and trans awareness week do. National Ice Cream Month does. The Black Music Month one does. And yet this one doesn't.

So black music month should be counted as far more official than trans awareness month should. In fact the former had a bill about it passed by Congress, it literally is more official! At the very least a count of African American related days vs trans related days should include black music month in it if it includes trans awareness month. If you don't, then you're just applying criteria inconsistently in order to fit a predetermined complaint.

You've been posting a constant stream of things that seem to defend libertarianism but which are either extreme, subtly wrong, or both.

This is just another way to say "things I personally disagree with". Like what exactly is extreme? My reform the FDA ideas are just like the things you'd find on Marginal Revolution. In my argument of ending anti discrimination law, I literally linked this ACX review.

Sure I guess compared to the average person who thinks social security should double, regulations should be endless and businesses are evil I'm extreme but in terms of the rationalist community I'm not uncommon. Maybe you should branch out more among rationalists beyond just this place.

Heaven forfend!

Imagine somebody having an extreme viewpoint on the Motte.

Or someone being subtly wrong on the Motte.

Come on, people having extreme views and being wrong on the Motte is something restricted to days that end in Y. Being extreme and wrong describes almost all of the Motte. The Motte might productively be defined as a place where you can be extreme and wrong.

The meta complaints about me are really interesting like that. Does someone really lack such self awareness that they don't recognize themotte, a pretty radical spinoff of an already pretty out there and eccentric group (rationalists) would be made up of a bunch of people with wildly different views from general society?

Well yeah probably, this place is bound to be autism central, such deficiency is expected to some degree. But it's like that meme of "autistic person meeting someone else slightly more autistic", like woah.

But I also think such meta complaints are used to mask a lack of meaningful response to the actual comment.

Is there a good criteria in which something like Black Music Month, which has a wikipedia page and congressional approval should not be counted as observed when comparing African American related holidays to trans holidays, but under which trans awareness month should be? Perhaps, I can't think of any but there might be I suppose.

There's been no answer regarding the actual meat of my argument there. Maybe he has an answer and just won't give it, maybe he has a convincing criteria that blows mine out of the water. Where was it?

This behavior is not uncommon for the site. For example consider this discussion where instead of providing any evidentiary meat to chew on to back up the claims that police had charged a protestor for assault when they were just defending themselves (like a Fox News article about it, or the charging documents, or something other than "random x user says so"), commentors get into a meta discussion. Where is it? Where's the meat? No one wants to provide any.

I even said this in a comment then

How about instead of having a meta conversation, we have the actual conversation where someone finally provides semi decent evidence for their claims a guy was charged for bruising and officers fists while blocking beyond "guy on X said so".

It all seems like a way to dodge that maybe said evidence might not actually exist. I couldn't find any! You double checked and didn't find it. So where is it?

Of the 10 people who saw this and down voted, none of them had any interest in providing actual evidence for the claims presented. Same with the original comment asking for any actual piece of evidence, no one seemed to think that providing proof was a reasonable part of discussion?

It's all meta hate, no substance.

I suppose it's easier to identify as an individualist, a heretic, a brave defier of social orthodoxies, etc., than it is to actually tolerate individualism or defiance when they arise. Just as the Motte is radical compared to wider society, you're radical compared to the Motte. You have a minority, unpopular position, sure, but I don't think your arguments for it are noticeably worse or more bad-faith than the modal Motte post on other subjects.

My point isn't "magicalkittycat is great". People can disagree on that, like you, dislike you, whatever. That's up to them. It's that I think you are not below the average level of discourse quality on this website, irrespective of one's position.

For what it's worth, on this particular issue, I think FtttG's Substack post is generally correct in its conclusion, and the comparison between Freddie's take on trans and Freddie's take on DID is damning. There clearly is room for good-faith hesitation, skepticism, or even opposition to various policies that trans advocates have, demonstrably, asked for. That said, I also agree that the Wesley Yang list of calendar days is a weak argument. There are specious days of awareness for pretty much everything, because there are no rules about who can declare them, and no governing authorities recognising them. The only month-long events I'd heard of in November are Movember, NaNoWriMo, and, er, the one about masturbation, but Wikipedia has a huge list of observances, most of which are obviously trivial. Consider the likes of No Music Day, which appears to just be one guy grinding an axe.

The point FtttG is making overall is, I think, correct, in that it's a bit rich to accuse conservatives of politicising the transgender issue or drawing attention to it. "You brought it up!" is the correct response for conservatives to make, perhaps with a side order of, "If it's so trivial and unimportant, why don't you just give in?" But the proliferation of completely vacuous days of remembrance or awareness days that nobody has ever heard of or cares about is indeed a phenomenon. The argument survives that - Pride Month, which is observed and recognised, is sufficient for FtttG's point - but I acknowledge your nitpick is valid.

Just as the Motte is radical compared to wider society, you're radical compared to the Motte.

One important question, radical to who. The anti western democracy beliefs of a few users here is wildly radical even compared to some of the farthest right corners of mainstream Trump supporters (I live in a Trump >+20 county in NC, I've talked to plenty of normie republicans and I don't think any of them are as wildly anti western democracy as some of the posts here) but might look milquetoast in China or Russia.

My strong belief in free trade is the mainstream opinion of economists and one of the dominant beliefs of the Republican party for like >50 years, and yet when put up to the current ruling politicians as a gauge, I am now radical because the winds have shifted with our pro tariff president. Or actually, I would have been except tariffs are one of Trump's least popular policies and most Americans still seem to be rather pro free trade. So which belief is radical there? Depends on who we use as a baseline, the current president or the American people?

The point FtttG is making overall is, I think, correct, in that it's a bit rich to accuse conservatives of politicising the transgender issue or drawing attention to it. "You brought it up!" is the correct response for conservatives to make, perhaps with a side order of, "If it's so trivial and unimportant, why don't you just give in?"

The conclusion could be overall correct, I didn't comment on that. I specifically went for the clearly bad logic regarding calender days, because that is clearly bad logic.

The criteria chosen for which days or months get included is terrible. It was terrible enough that if it wasn't for "the writer was just being too lazy or stupid to consider if there was other observed days for African Americans that meet the level we use for trans related ones" being a valid explanation, I would assume it was in purposeful bad faith.

By 'radical' I meant 'in the local minority'.

On the scale of the Motte, you are a minority. On the scale of the whole United States, most Motte consensus views are unpopular minority views. On the scale of the whole world, most American consensus views are unpopular minority views.

In a large essay, I do nitpick things, but in general I think a good essay-writer will try to provide multiple justifications for their important points, so if one or two of those justifications are a bit weaker, I try to be generous. The basic point "trans issues are not a confection of the right" is correct, and the supporting evidence "look at the way that left-wing organisations and actors have tried to push public awareness and discussion of trans issues" is correct, and "organised celebrations like Pride Month are an example of this" is also correct. I do think that FtttG and Wesley Yang overstep themselves a little by citing every claimed day or month, but that's not the kind of overstep that makes me dismiss them entirely. I don't think that's unreasonably gullible or charitable of me?

It's, I suppose, a type of gotcha. I think the gotcha is true, but I also think the claim can easily survive it. FtttG could very easily concede the point that not all those days are meaningfully celebrated without it harming his overall argument.

More comments

I'd believe it.

I did a spot check of one of my Facebook friends: 12 posts so far for Pride month (up from nine last year), two for Transgender Day of Visibility (Nov 20), and one for Trans Awareness Week (Nov 17-21), and one last year for International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. None for Trans Awareness Month over the past two years.

Maybe it's because he's Canadian, but I doubt it because LGBT issues are more international than most.

I'd count the week as part of the month. It's clearly the same celebration with the same origin, even if celebrating the week is not literally the same as celebrating the month. The relevant part to the argument is the existence of the celebration at all, not how long it lasts.

I think we have to stick to pedantry here, and set aside the wider view. It's a separate entry in the list in the article, and having a known bad item on the list is weak evidence that the list as a whole is bad.

Remember that the original complaint was "1: It's easy to make up as many unofficial days as you want.". Trans Awareness Month is plausibly made up by a small group and listed by an aggregator, but not actually celebrated by any significant number of people.

You could easily argue that trans issues are overrepresented in general, but I think this is a reasonable objection on that one point.

People haven't "made up" the event in a relevant sense when organizations are using a week instead of a month and the week is clearly related to the month.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats