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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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A common argument in trans discourse is "who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."

I've spent years operating on the opposite assumption about myself, that I'm a bad judge of myself. Furthermore, everyone has dissatisfaction with themselves and the world. Personally, I flip-flop, get dissatisfied about my life and direction, but most people tell me "that's life, get over it". But if I had a trans-like belief that "I know what I am, but the world won't let me be it," with tons of people telling me over and over that I'm right and there are evil people out to get me, I think I'd have latched onto it hard. Not because it's necessarily true, though. It converts vague restlessness into a clear enemy and a fixed identity, and that provides false stability and obsession for a feeling of listlessness.

So I don't buy that conviction is evidence of accuracy. If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it. I think it's at least possible that having an outside view is more accurate than one's own personal beliefs.

Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?

Let's talk about your penis. How do you feel about it on a scale from 1 to 10 where

1 is "An appendage I associate with great fun and joy especially when it's very hard and having an orgasm and ejaculating inside of a female"

and 10 is more like "A fleshy ugly cockroach-like thing sticking out of my body that I would cut off at the first opportunity if I could find and afford a doctor willing to do it"

Do you find yourself flip flopping much between those? Do you think you should trust your belief less if you are firmly at #1 rather than scoring your penis a more even and sober #5?

There are a lot of narcissistic tourists to trans stuff that cloudy the discourse considerably but there are honest to goodness people that are at #10 and have been for as long as they can remember.

We should aim to treat 10 with psychological interventions. I highly doubt we have exhausted the possibilities for treating the disorder. Have we tried psychedelics, like ecstasy and LSD, to nudge them toward loving themselves? As a last resort, maybe we allow them to neuter themselves, but there is as much relation between “sever junk” and “I’m a beautiful woman” as there is between “sever limb” and “I’m a butterfly”. There is no reason to think that 10 is closer to being a woman than 1. The most adamant transgenders are often the most masculinized behaviorally. In what sense does a 10 who is a video game speedrunner or a fan of Paradox games plausibly know what being a woman involves? It’s likely that they know less about the inner life of women than the average rugby player whose name is literally Chad.

Quite right, it's like those ftm people who film these tearful face-in-camera clips for tiktok about how they never realized men don't have these female-style social attachments and how it's so lonely being a man and how men need to act more like women in affirming eachother. Mindset, worldview and even diction remains female even with some wimpy beard and hairstyle changes on the outside.

There are indeed actual men who go on tiktok and behave like that, there are male feminist types... but it's a very unusual kind of man who does this and many of them might just be faking it for access to pussy.

It’s likely that they know less about the inner life of women than the average rugby player whose name is literally Chad.

Let alone the upside of having a penis. I was a speedrunner once. And while I certainly had no desire to be castrated, that sick voice in my head has certainly wondered, at times, whether it would have made me better off.

That is arguably a good first line approach.

But what if you're the person suffering from this kind of body dysphoria and you've tried a number of psychological interventions, nothing works, and you also have bouts of self harm because of how upsetting it is and you're pretty damn sure if you could just have it removed you'd feel a lot better about yourself and there's countless reports on Internet forums from people like you who went through the same thing and life got way better for them?

You know there's a risk it might not help but you're willing to try because you just find yourself wishing you could die with increasing frequency?

There are also people who want to have healthy limbs amputated and feel the same way about their leg or arm as the 10 feels about their penis. Should we accommodate them? Some surgeons would say "yes". Even though for some of them, being a wheelchair user is also bound up with some kind of fetish? Again, some would say "yes".

But if we consider it a sign of mental unwellness to think your left arm is an alien appendage and you want it cut off, then the same applies to the penis. That's where we're coming from: a 10 person can be completely sincere in their feelings but also mentally unwell.

Should we accommodate them?

Only if we could replace them with cool action hero augmentations!

a 10 person can be completely sincere in their feelings but also mentally unwell.

I get what you're saying, but there are hormonal factors behind gender dysphoria in adults. I doubt there is an equivalent variable in wanting to saw off your limbs beyond a sick fetish. FWIW I'm happy to still classify gender dysphoria as a mental illness and homosexuality as disability-adjacent, even though I don't have any issue with either on moral grounds.

I doubt there is an equivalent variable in wanting to saw off your limbs beyond a sick fetish.

But it's a dysphoria! And if it's a dysphoria, then it must be accommodated, correct?

Only if we could replace them with cool action hero augmentations!

I did in fact ask for this, as it were.

To borrow some lefty terminology, a lot of people carry around a lot of emotional trauma. The idea that you should leverage that via threats of suicide to get other people to rearrange their lives around you or otherwise directly pay for cosmetic surgeries for you to get you over your trauma isn't the positive argument trans advocates think it is.

Following that is the simple fact that you don't need to exist as a sexual entity. Plenty of obese people turn asexual because they understand on some level that their obese body will never be what they want. Even if they lost weight, it would be a disaster of loose skin and morphed body parts requiring surgeries they can't afford. They don't want to have sex with their body anymore so they just don't. It's sad, it's traumatic, they still wake up and face the day.

The line between being a sad but relatable human being and being a narcissistic sociopath gets crossed by most trannies when they huddle together and start demanding privileges for their group and not others. They don't campaign on changing the classification of a lot of cosmetic surgeries from cosmetic to necessary. No, they just want those things for the trans. No consideration for anyone else but them.

On top of that, white men have held the high score on the suicide charts for a long time now. Did any tranny advocate ever allow that fact to sway them one way or another when it comes to the anti-white political projects they seemingly all participate in? No. Not once ever. So why should any white man be swayed by the argument when we change suicide victims? Trans people invoking suicides are not invoking an objective standard but their own ingroup preference for themselves.

Trans-advocacy exists as a group entity hostile to practically everything that allows trans people to exist in the first place. It's woven itself together with nigh every nihilistic anti-white political ideology that exists. If they had any semblance of kindness for the other they would not advertise their transness as anything other than a disease to be avoided. But as has been the case with the many chat groups that form around their identity, they are more interested in spreading their ailment than preventing it. Like a 'health at every size' advocate that presents obesity as healthy right up until the day they die from their obesity.

Maybe some people are obese because they genuinely have medical issues that cause them to gain an absurd amount of weight. And maybe some trans people are a #10. But the idea that this is what the trans identity advocates are representing, just like the idea that HAES is presenting healthy big boned folks, is an obvious falsehood.

I appreciate this argument but I would also like to push back a bit.

How do you feel about women whose breasts grow grotesquely huge after childbirth and they have breast reductions so they can regain range of motion and feel less bad about how they look? Most insurance actually covers this.

What about dudes who feel very scrawny and not manly enough who take steroids and hit the gym and get swole? Doctors will never prescribe steroids for this even out of pocket and even if the guy feels suicidal.

What if trans rights groups stopped at simply demanding the medical right to have access to hormones and trans surgeries but didn't demand health insurance or social medical plans cover it. Is that okay?

I am all in favor of QoL or beautifying surgeries for mothers relating to their pregnancy.

I think doctors should look at broadening the scope for administering steroids to men insofar as it can be of benefit to them. That being said I believe the amount of men that would benefit from using steroids is small. Most of them just need to exercise.

I don't understand the implication of a medical right in this context. For instance, you don't need a medical right to buy a plane ticket and pay out of pocket for whatever cosmetic surgery you want.

If you are digging at a point with these questions I've missed it and you must spell it out for me.

I don't understand the implication of a medical right in this context. For instance, you don't need a medical right to buy a plane ticket and pay out of pocket for whatever cosmetic surgery you want.

I mean doctors will give you the sex change hormones or surgeries you ask for if you pay them their fee.

Are you okay with laws banning these trans medical practices or are you okay with consenting adults doing these things?

In the context of a western society I don't think genital mutilation has any place. On top of that the proliferation of drugs and the effort from trans advocates to have minors take them makes me question the safety of allowing them easy access to them. But it goes further than that.

Trans advocacy is in a corner right now. They've tethered themselves to the idea that the best way for a trans person to escape their male body is to go on hormone treatment very young. It makes sense biologically from a 'looksmaxxing' perspective, to borrow a term, but this flies in the face of any civilized conception of children and their ability to make decisions for themselves. If they had been more responsible and sane then I'd feel differently about their easy access to hormones. But as things stand? On one side trans people are a coalition of consenting adults with agency who decided to direct energy towards legalizing permanent body modification regimen for children, on the other a medically destitute group of mentally suffering victims on the verge of suicide. In neither case do I feel comfortable giving them easy access to permanent body modification or drugs.

To complicate things further, a lot of trans people will never pass. Giving such people 'trans affirming care' is a waste of time and effort. I could only support hormone treatment for a specific subset of trans individuals who have a chance at passing. And even then I find the entire endeavor morally questionable considering the implications of what happens to a human body after the age of ~35.

In real terms, with the most charitable interpretation possible for the trans side where we are talking about sexually a-typical but otherwise rational and well adjusted people who are not binding themselves to any hostile political message and are just looking to aesthetically please themselves in a safe and controlled way, we are essentially talking about looksmaxxing a select few men into looking like young women so they can sell themselves on social media or engage in sex work for a decade or so before we meet a line of hard reality modern medicine has not yet figured out how to address. That doesn't seem like a worthwhile effort to me.

To contrast that with something that I would find worthwhile: Giving young men testosterone that would lead to them not be depressed and alone and instead push them towards being productive members of society that make families. What is the case that makes transing people worthwhile? Because I genuinely don't believe that the ratio of potentially passable non transed people who would otherwise commit suicide is in any relevant way aided by the procedures we have today if we look at things long term. Outside of a few social media stars and sex workers who can leverage their unique status to make enough money. Nor do I believe that transing unpassable people is going to alleviate their woes. Since they will have to face the day and go to work knowing full well that they look off.

It's sad, it's traumatic, they still wake up and face the day.

And two centuries ago, people saw half their children die. It was sad, it was traumatic, they still woke up and faced the day.

We have overcome many things that were seen by previous generations as unalterable realities of life, giving the common person in today's world at least some benefits that were out of reach in earlier ages even to the mightiest kings. This process must continue at an increasing rate.

I do not put triumph over sickness, infirmity and hunger in the same box as deciding that you don't need to consider fellow humans either.

Well, I certainly don't think 1 is in absolute and completely direct conflict with 10. I do think penises are ugly and weird, and I envy the smooth sleek female form sometimes.

When I was going through puberty and slightly before, and a bit afterward too, I had beliefs and hatreds about my body and penis, that I know now to be completely untrue, that I thought would mean that I would never find anyone who could love me in my life. Things changed for me eventually, but there were times when my feelings in that regard were stably different from what they are now. I've been firmly wrong before, and so has everyone.

As for "as long as they can remember", I don't take that at face value either. I'd have said the same thing at the time about my own beliefs. What counts as "long enough" to trust it? At very minimum, I don't think a belief formed before adulthood is a reliable basis for a permanent decision, whatever the belief is.

Also, I don't think I ever said that I trust someone's beliefs about himself specifically if they are more in the middle of a spectrum. I simply don't trust anyone's beliefs about himself.

I do think penises are ugly and weird

Some and some.

A fleshy ugly cockroach-like thing sticking out of my body that I would cut off at the first opportunity if I could find and afford a doctor willing to do it

But statistically, everyone has to deal with this. It's called "having excess adipose tissue". You feel your stomach bunch up around you when you're sitting down. It's not particularly comfortable. I'd slam a knife into it and remove the offending tissue myself if it wasn't going to kill me or leave an absurd scar.

Now yes, sensory considerations mean I'm reminded of this fact more than other people, and is probably why the autism-trans pipeline exists considering sensory body-can't-forget-itself issues and autism are comorbid. (Actually, I bet the same is true of eating disorders. If I felt that happen to my body, yes, I'd absolutely try to eat as little as possible and/or throw up.)

It's kind of like the "gayness is evil, but some are tempted more than others" question, complete with the modern response of "well, it's everyone else's problem if they don't like it, just do whatever you want all the time". You can't just decide to keep the productive parts for whatever reason.

If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it.

If the pope followed that advice, he would need to question his identity as a Catholic a lot.

I think that a gender identity (as used by pro-trans people) is not something falsifiable. Other unfalsifiable beliefs might be the belief that you are a good person or that you are among the elect. Or more mundanely, that you prefer strawberry to vanilla ice cream -- which is technically not something unfalsifiable, but very few people would care to quantify that objectively and correct people who claim the wrong flavor preference. ("Actually, we have analyzed your ice cream buying behavior and EEG responses and you are definitely a vanilla-lover.")

I think that a gender identity (as used by pro-trans people) is not something falsifiable

Oh contraire- to the extent that it exists, it's pretty easy to falsify- they do it every time they use the toilet. It's like insisting that they're six meters tall, no they're not, every time they go through the door they disprove their assertion.

to the extent that it exists, it's pretty easy to falsify

The median trans woman does not make the claim that she was not born a biological male. Instead, she has a concept of "woman" which allows her to claim membership of that set.

Attaching a certain label to a given set of items is not something which can be wrong. You can certainly argue that (1) it does not carve reality at its joints and (2) that it goes against pre-existing usage. Neither is unprecedented. In fact, if you look at the etymology of pretty much any word you will find that its membership set has drifted over centuries.

And I'm six meters tall in some deep and profound way that doesn't correspond to physical reality. I just feel bigger than my house.

You are using "tall" in a non-standard way in that sentence, meaning it evaluates to "not even wrong" rather than "true" or "false".

Transactivists are using the word "woman" in a way which is non-standard to the rest of us, but standard in their filter bubble. The word string "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman" has different meanings in English and Wokespeak, in the same way that the word string "I'm going to bum a fag" has different meanings in British English and American English*. Both meanings are clear, and the English meaning evaluates as "false" while the Wokespeak meaning evaluates as "true". Caitlyn Jenner being a woman in the Wokespeak meaning of the word is a true fact about the world (regardless of whether you like the use of the word "woman" to refer to it) in the same way that whales being feesh is.

I happen to think that the English meaning is more useful than the Wokespeak meaning, because (among other things) it allows you to talk about reproductive medicine using words that 100IQ patients can understand.

* One of my university friends was kicked out of a biker bar in rural Michigan for this. Both possible meanings turned out to be false, although the fool had intended for the British one to be true. Apparently outlaw bikers don't commit more crimes than necessary, so if you leave politely when asked, you don't actually get beaten up.

But the essential problem with the ‘it’s true in wokespeak’ is that the wokespeak term doesn’t have a definition. There’s a (hilarious)movie about it. The sentence ‘can I bum a fag’ has different meanings in American and British English- thé key word being meaning, one of those meanings being rather unfortunate to express to outlaw bikers. But the alternate meaning is also well defined, and while outlaw bikers might not let you borrow a cig they would understand the concept. In contrast thé wokespeak sentence ‘Caitlin Jenner is a woman’ doesn’t express a concept, as far as anyone can tell- it means as much as my 14 month old saying… no one’s quite sure.

But the essential problem with the ‘it’s true in wokespeak’ is that the wokespeak term doesn’t have a definition. There’s a (hilarious)movie about it. The sentence ‘can I bum a fag’ has different meanings in American and British English- the key word being meaning, one of those meanings being rather unfortunate to express to outlaw bikers. But the alternate meaning is also well defined, and while outlaw bikers might not let you borrow a cig they would understand the concept. In contrast the wokespeak sentence ‘Caitlin Jenner is a woman’ doesn’t express a concept, as far as anyone can tell- it means as much as my 14 month old saying… no one’s quite sure.

The wokespeak term doesn't have a definition in the sense of a necessary and sufficient condition for being a "woman", expressed in terms of simpler concepts to avoid circularity. But it has an established usage which allows you to understand the core cases of "woman" and "not-woman", and Caitlin Jenner is within the core meaning of "woman" in wokespeak. This is completely normal for language - even the English meaning of "woman" doesn't have a scientific definition that matches the duck types in all the (vanishingly rare) corner cases. "Is Caster Semenya a woman?" would still be a confusing question if the whole trans silliness had never happened. [Of course, the wokespeak meaning is poorly specified, so there are orders of magnitude more corner cases].

The goal of transactivists is thought reform via changing the meaning of common words.

If the pope followed that advice, he would need to question his identity as a Catholic a lot.

That's an interesting point. If being the Pope is like being the best at any other profession, he probably DOES question his identity as a Catholic a lot. The Dunning kreuger effect; anyone who's really good at something feels like they're not good (even if they consciously know they are) because they pay so much attention to the nuance of their skill that they can see every little mistake.

Being the Pope, you're probably in constant war with yourself seeing all the sin in your own heart that you must overcome all the time. Just a guess.

That's an interesting point. If being the Pope is like being the best at any other profession, he probably DOES question his identity as a Catholic a lot.

If the pope has only little grain of actual faith, he knows that nothing happens by accident (at least at such spiritual pinnacle of the world as Vatican), he knows that Pope is not picked by fallible sinful men, but Holy Spirit personally.

(sometimes as inspiration and reward, sometimes as warning and chastisement)

I think it's at least possible that having an outside view is more accurate than one's own personal beliefs.

I would say that's true, at least for a lot of people. Here are some mundane thought experiments:

Suppose you went to one of those "sign and drive" used car lots which cater to people with marginal credit. And you surveyed potential buyers, asking them what they thought the likelihood was that they would make the payments on their car on time and avoid all the ridiculous interest, penalties, repossession, etc. I'm pretty confident that most of the buyers, perhaps all, would self-report a high likelihood of success. Something that's demonstrably at odds with reality.

It's the same phenomenon at gyms in January. People sign up for year-long memberships, genuinely believing that they will make use of them. But the gym's owners know better. They know that they simply don't have the capacity to serve everyone who signs up. But they aren't worried because they know that the majority of the people who think they will use their memberships will simply stop showing up after a few weeks.

And if you think the issue is peoples' statements about future intention are unreliable, how about this: You ask people to rate their vocabulary on a scale of 1 to 10 with 5 being average. Then you give them a vocabulary test. Or you ask people to self-report how good they are at driving a car. (I recall reading that most people report themselves to be well above average in driving skills). I think it's worth emphasizing that when someone self-reports to be a good driver, it's very likely that they are being sincere. At least that's my impression.

I think the basic rule is that a large percentage of people don't know themselves very well. And that very frequently, others know them better.

So yeah, I would say that if someone self-reports to be a woman trapped in a man's body (or vice versa), it's unreliable.

The loathsome worm whose idealised conception of himself is grossly at odds with the reality is a stock comic figure. When an adult male insists that he is a woman, but behaves in a manner entirely consistent with an entitled and pornsick man, that's funny to me in the same way that I find it funny when Michael Scott from The Office thinks (contrary to all evidence) that he's a great screenwriter, or Joey Tribbiani from Friends thinks he's a talented actor. Our conception of ourselves can never (perhaps should never) be entirely accurate, and yet extreme examples (wherein a person's self-conception is enormously out of step with the objective reality) are intrinsically funny.

When an adult male insists that he is a woman, but behaves in a manner entirely consistent with an entitled and pornsick man

What behaviour, if exhibited by a trans woman, would you concede is not 'entirely consistent with an entitled and pornsick man'?

Crocheting.

In practice, liking it up the butt. Kathoey-hijra type MtFs are not entitled and pornsick men, they are gay men who are sufficiently effeminate that the social role of "woman" is more accessible than the social role of "conventionally gay guy". In practice they don't seem to cause the problems that AGPs do.

So, if Alice née Alan crochets, you would conclude that she is not 'an entitled and pornsick man'?

If that is not your meaning, than I might not have been clear exactly what I was asking.

The question I am attempting to ask is: Is there any pattern of behaviour by Alice née Alan that you would consider sufficient to establish that Alice is not 'an entitled and pornsick man', while also not accepting your previously expressed Views on men, women, and the distinction therebetween, or is this a Kafka-trap wherein the mere fact of Alice claiming to be a woman while being AMAB is proof of her being 'an entitled and pornsick man'?

I don't think that all trans-identified males are entitled pornsick men, and have a certain amount of sympathy for the homosexual variety (per Blanchard's typology). But plenty of them are, and aren't even being discreet about it.

is this a Kafka-trap wherein the mere fact of Alice claiming to be a woman while being AMAB is proof of her being 'an entitled and pornsick man'?

A Kafkatrap is when denying an accusation of X is taken as evidence that the accusation is well-founded. I have never claimed that anyone who denies being pornsick therefore is pornsick. Even the claim "any man who claims to be trans is entitled and pornsick" wouldn't be an example of a Kafkatrap, although that isn't the claim I made. I don't believe all trans-identified males are pornsick, nor all pornsick men trans. I believe this was abundantly obvious from my original comment.

Being obsessed with soap operas instead of military science fiction would be a good start.

A dizzying amount of transpeople are autistic, but I never met a single one whose associated obsessions didn't follow their birth sex very strongly.

But is that downstream of natal biology, or of assumed gender during childhood and adolescence?

(Also, I'm not so sure 'autistic person' and 'primary plot driver is the sort of petty social status competitions found in a high-school lunchroom' really fit that well together, even if the autistic person is a cis-woman. Does anyone have stats on the distribution of interests in autistic versus not autistic cis-women?)

But is that downstream of natal biology, or of assumed gender during childhood and adolescence?

Congratulations, your hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

If a trans-identified male behaves in a conventionally feminine manner or has conventionally feminine interests, that's proof that he's a woman trapped in a man's body. If a trans-identified male behaves in a conventionally masculine manner or has conventionally masculine interests, that's proof that he was socialised as male against his will. Under this rubric, there is literally nothing a trans-identified male can do that might reasonably lead one to question his trans identification.

You're constantly gushing about Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Sequences, but seem to have failed to internalise a message he hammered home a lot therein: if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing.

You'll also notice that many gay men have conventionally feminine interests in spite of their gender being (correctly) assumed to be male throughout childhood and adolescence.

But is that downstream of natal biology, or of assumed gender during childhood and adolescence?

Does it matter? This just means that even if you concede that gender would be somehow separate from sex and defined by apparent looks or behavior, these people still code in the bucket of 'male'.

Most of it just comes down to basic self-awareness/self-control, so stuff like:

  • Dressing appropriately for the occasion, skipping clothes that just don't fit (stuff beyond your garden-variety 'has no fashion sense'), being clean-shaven
  • If already in possession of an androgynous name, retaining that name; if not, selecting an androgynous name for compatibility

But having basic self-awareness/self-control is negatively correlated with being visibly trans (and accusations of porn-brainedness are derivatives of that), so even if there is a dark mass of ex-men/ex-women who are doing this, it's significantly harder to observe attributes of someone who doesn't want you to see them. (I suspect this is far less common for ex-women simply because the male uniform is unisex.) At least the more self-aware types tend to wear masks as an anti-jawline measure.

Then again, "being an obnoxious attention whore" is a stereotypically feminine trait. So maybe I do indeed err by failing to take them at their word that they're a walking minstrel show and a loudly-ticking social time bomb. I'm not sure which is better.

If already in possession of an androgynous name, retaining that name; if not, selecting an androgynous name for compatibility

In other words, yielding to others' belief that she is a 'delusional man in a dress'?

A name like that isn't doing any heavy lifting trying to force pronouns, be they deserved or not.

Being [able to be] at the mercy of external actors evaluating what gender they believe you are is kind of the point; forcing the issue is the root hostile action.

yielding to

As opposed to actively imposing the belief that he isn't, which is the same problem from the other direction.

Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?

If people were able to be real and honest with themselves and their self-intuitions were reliable, we would not have such a booming therapeutic/self-help industry. No, in my opinion most people are actually pretty bad at knowing themselves. Of course they think they do. Who wants to admit that their self-image bears no resemblance to reality, or that how other people see them might be more accurate than how they see themselves?

Intelligent, assured, and emotionally stable people don't have to worry about this much, and may not understand just how many people are not all of those things.

This doesn't mean there are no trans people who really and truly experience gender dysphoria and an internal sense that their gender is different than their biological sex. Whether or not that is "real" in the sense of being a thing that exists outside their mind, it's real enough to cause genuine distress and I'm sympathetic. But no, I don't think every one of them is really and truly what they perceive themselves to be and the best judge of what their "real" sex is just because they feel it.

There was a time, many years ago, where one of my weird fascinations was the fat acceptance movement (this was early days, when they were still pretty fringe). I was into health and fitness at the time, after having lost a considerable amount of weight myself. I started reading the forums of people who initially fell into this subculture because, well, they were fat, they were unhappy about it, but losing weight is hard. As you might imagine, the levels of cope and rationalization would give trans people some serious competition. Every pseudo-scientific and psychological theory under the sun to explain why losing weight and keeping it off is absolutely and totally impossible and never works, which leads to elaborate theories of socialization to explain that actually, being fat is sexy and normal and it's just our modern society that's stigmatized fat.

Anyway, as you might imagine, many, many people would cruise by and ("helpfully" or otherwise) tell them they were delusional and/or there are actually ways to lose weight. A common refrain from the FA people was essentially what trans people say: "How dare you presume that you know more about our bodies than we do?"

Thing is, yeah, a lot of people actually did know more about their bodies than they did, because the things they thought about their bodies were mostly unscientific cope that flew in the face of reality. Plus the mundane things, like I can't count how many times I've read about someone who weighs 300 or 400 pounds insisting that they literally ate 800 calories and did 2 hours of exercise daily for weeks and physically could not lose weight. No, I am not exaggerating, I have seen those literal numbers quoted. And sometimes much less extreme, but still clearly unrealistic, figures. The degree to which all of these people really believed this, I cannot say, but I'm sure some of them did somehow manage to convince themselves that the bags of chips and bottles of soda and extra whip mocha frappucinos didn't "count."

I think in many ways they are very similar to trans people: they feel something is wrong about their bodies, they would like to change it, but change is hard and difficult, especially when it's your own thinking that needs to change, so instead, they decide it's other people's perceptions that should change.

elaborate theories of socialization to explain that actually, being fat is sexy and normal and it's just our modern society that's stigmatized fat.

Directionally correct. The doctors legit did screw up when drawing up the BMI chart originally; the minimum mortality weight range is BMI 25-30 (the heart issues are outweighed by your immune system running at full power), and I ate my way up into that range on medical advice. And 90s-00s beauty standards (after that it gets complicated because of these very people influencing SJ and more generally culture war values decoherence) do tend to fall below that range, while pre-1900 beauty standards did run pretty plump (as do mine, personally).

Emphasis on "directionally", though; 200kg women are not sexy or healthy, and the ones that refuse to take responsibility for other people's chairs they crush are pretty annoying.

BMI 25-30 is historically unusual. Reubensque figures have often been considered attractive; modern obese Americans are not.

Being slightly plump might increase your overall longevity, but relative to other factors, I'll take not fat and active over fat and sedentary. Attractiveness is subjective but whatever heroin chic fashion might have been in style in the 90s, I got really sick of seeing FA advocates argue that humans naturally are fat and some Pacific island tribe proves that obese women are actually sexy.

BMI 25-30 is historically unusual.

For peasants, yes. For aristocrats, no, not really. (This probably has approximately everything to do with why people considered being fat to be beautiful.)

Gender identity immediately breaks down outside the context of the narcissistic modern west. Everyone else who's ever lived has lived in direct relationship to those around them. Placing the onus of deciding the gender for ourselves leads to strange or ridiculous outcomes some percentage of the time. Traditionally you are just whatever gender the people around you assign to you which would correspond to genitalia nearly all the time.

If someone asks for my pronouns I am irritated that I have to decide for myself because I think it should be designated by someone outside of myself in relation to the averages and experiences of society. If they assign an exogonous gender to my imagined self then it will tell me something about me, or them, but at least it relieves me of the pressure of having to assert something about myself.

Picking your own gender and asserting its correctness is dumb and ridiculous but completely consistent with the dumbness and ridiculousness of the modern west.

I think the issue is that most trans people don't feel that the outside view is operating in good faith. If there was a society wide consensus that transness was value neutral and all we were after was diagnostic accuracy then it would be easier to trust the outside view, but outside of particular social microclimates transness is stigmatized and so if you really are trans the outside view is going to be wrong. It's true that this oppositional relationship can polarize people into false certainty, but that seems like an inevitable consequence of the stigma, the more costly a decision is the bigger the sunk cost, the more people are going to dig in and defend their decision. Make the decision less costly, build trust that the outside view is a neutral diagnosis, and people may be more willing to reconsider it.

I'd also say that the opposite error, excessive trust of the outside view or not transitioning because of the cost, is very common. I felt that I was trans as a teenager and didn't transition for over a decade because I felt that if there was any uncertainty I should avoid the social/material costs of transitioning. This is not an uncommon story and I feel I would have been better off transitioning younger. Whatever the metaphysics of identity transition itself is a decision and subject to social incentives, and outside of certain social microclimates those incentives are overwhelmingly against transition.

I think the issue is that most trans people don't feel that the outside view is operating in good faith.

Well, that's one of the issues. And to be sure, a lot of trans opposition is religion-based, or just gut level "Ewww!" reactions, which I agree just use any "diagnosis" of transness as not real as post hoc justification.

However, any attempts at actual diagnostic accuracy have been summarily rejected by the trans movement. Jesse Singhal is a tragic case study: he is despised by the trans community almost as much as JK Rowling, because his whole thing is deep dives into studies and data analysis, in which he consistently shows that trans studies tend to suffer from all kinds of shoddy methodology. And despite the fact that he's about as liberal as they come and repeatedly asserts his support for trans rights, he is accused of being, like JK Rowling, a fascist who wants to see trans children dead in the streets.

So while I understand the mistrust you might have for a generally hostile "outside view," the fact that you take it for granted that any negative conclusion must be bad faith and born of hostility rather than clinical assessment means that there isn't really any way to find some common rational basis for settling trans issues.

And as I've said before, I think the actual issue is trans right supporters being unwilling to confront the bad faith actors in their own camp. People like (presumably) you who just want to live your lives and would trouble no one would be mostly accepted even by the majority of the population who doesn't really believe your gender self-identification is real. But you have a small but vocal group that does things like dress like Cormac McCarthy's hellish parade of Commanches and behaves in the most aggressive, male manner possible while screaming that they "don't owe anyone femininity" and you will call them she/her/they. You have trans women who make a point of inserting themselves into every female space they can, from lesbian dating apps to Girl Guides, just to make a crusade out of crushing the expected resistance. And you have the grifters and the "pornsick men" who are obviously, obviously autogynephiles and getting off on making other people (pretend to) see them as women, and in many cases making people pretend to see the emperor's new clothes is part of their delight in the experience.

It should not be surprising that these highly visible faces of the trans movement make a greater impression on trans opponents than the folks who "just want to pee."

Personally I have a temperamental attraction to conciliation and respectability politics, but I transitioned recently and generally defer to my elders. When I talk to the trans women who transitioned over a decade ago about politics the general response I get is that the animus against us is so great there's no return on respectability politics, trans people cannot make themselves respectable so why bother trying. I think this is kind of outdated and the animus has lessened to the point where it might be worthwhile but it's hard to change that perception.

As to confronting the bad faith actors in our camp, let me try to make an analogy. If the American right stood up and said "the liberals are right, there really are a bunch of racist fascists among us, let's work really hard to kick them all out, then the liberals will definitely stop calling us racist fascists" how do you think that would work out for the right? Perhaps it would improve the general popularity of the conservative movement if it could iterate exactly once and excommunicate the most racist 1% of RW media figures as adjudicated by the New York Times. But if you accept their premise that there's a bunch of fascists in your midst and accept their authority to name who is a fascist you lock in a dynamic that will iterate towards an outcome you'd likely find unacceptable.

I think that's basically the intuition behind trans people not wanting to give cis people any say in who is really trans even if this sometimes has pretty ridiculous results. Personally I think this stand is misguided and won't hold up, a group that's 1% of the population has to make more concessions to outside opinions than a group that's 40% of the population. In the long run some sort of compromise will have to be made.

We're also in an era of decentralized viral communication, movement's have much less power to pick their spokespeople than before. The liberal media will boost right wing guys who says provocative things that most right wingers don't believe, because that's an attention getting story. Similarly I think there's always going to be a demand for stories about non passing trans women behaving outrageously and the community doesn't really have the ability to decide who becomes highly visible and who doesn't.

I do think there are the beginning of some changes that might lead to something different in the long run. There's a growing hostility between "everybody's valid" queer people and "I desperately want to change my body and will pay immense costs to do so" trans people. The political right forcing all AMAB people into men's spaces has different consequences for queer AMAB people who want to wear women's clothes sometimes and trans women who have taken hormones and developed breasts and a feminine body fat distribution. I think in time there may be a defensive move towards a framework that's based more around the ways in which people have changed their body than an internal psychological identity but who knows, intracoalitional queer politics are weird and I don't fully understand them.

I've seen other commenters on Reddit say similar, that they think any concession is giving the right an opening they can exploit to take things further. I think that the right does have animus, for instance I think Kansas immediately voiding trans government IDs was malicious. But I think they are making a mistake by thinking that if they don't pick every fight then they are losing.

For my part, a large contributing factor to why I refuse to use preferred pronouns is that the trans movement seems to always take the maximalist position and expect everyone else to do the same. They use the argument "sex and gender are two different things" to create support for the idea that someone can be different than what they were born as, but in practice gender is the only criteria. One could easily make the argument that trans women are women but sports are segregated based on sex, but in practice a trans advocate will never take that route and always fight for the position that allows trans women to compete as women. "Let the sports committee's decide" is the moderate-sounding solution because they will lobby said committee and get mad if the committee rules against them.

So while they don't want to give ammo to the right by offering any concession, I don't want to give them any support because I can't support them on A without them requiring or assuming support of B-Z.

There's a growing hostility between "everybody's valid" queer people and "I desperately want to change my body and will pay immense costs to do so" trans people.

There is? Reddit loves bringing up the "goomba fallacy" where person A accuses group B of being hypocrites by making mutually exclusive statements, when in fact B1 and B2 are said by different individuals. But I've found that person A can still have a point. I deliberately try to look at the views of a wide variety of people. I cannot recall a single time I've witnessed the "trans is a medical condition" and "trans is a lifestyle choice" camps ever actually debate each other. If person B1 and B2 simply act like they are in the same camp and support each other towards mutual ends while simply never acknowledging their contradictory stances, they get to inflate their numbers by counting their opposites as allies.

The difference, as you touch on, is that there is no majority which thinks GOP voters are all perverts who deserve whatever consequences. Sure, there's people that believe that. But a substantial percentage of people would react to 'transwomen using the mens locker room is a safety issue' with some variant of 'they deserve it for being perverts'. You kinda can't afford to not police your own.

Most things are a negotiation between you, reality, and the rest of society.

You can have limitless belief in the fact that you're smart. You can truly believe it in the deepest recesses of your soul. You can proclaim yourself a genius and fully believe you aren't lying. But if you have an IQ of 85... are you a genius?

Or for a more subjective example, you can truly believe that you're the most gorgeous creature on planet Earth. You can be completely in love with yourself, and carry yourself with limitless confidence. But if nobody else is actually attracted to you... are you actually attractive? (This works in reverse, too, you can believe you're hideous, but if everyone wants to fuck you, nobody is going to believe you saying you're ugly.)

You can't give yourself a nickname, you can't decide that you're cool. Some things have to be bestowed by others. Most things require tacit agreements from others.

Trans activists actually do recognise this, which is why they push so hard on enforcing your validation of their beliefs. A trans activist that truly believed that internal ID was all that mattered would not care what pronouns others used.

On the meta subject of skin in the game:

  • the phrase "skin in the game" is about the feedback loop between choices and consequences -- and not being isolated from them (e.g. policymakers)
  • the phrase "conflict of interest" is about how someone might make a "wrong choice" because of bias or wanting a particular outcome
  • for a funny example, consider who should make abortion policy. Arguably men have no skin in the game, arguably women would be biased.

In terms of the object level of transgender, I think it comes down to how skeptical you are that gender identity and their definitions describe a real thing that exists; or if they are just mouth noises to obtain a particular outcome. For example, if trans agenda is just a "give into my desire" policy, it's not coherent to talk about correctness.

the phrase "conflict of interest" is about how someone might make a "wrong choice" because of bias or wanting a particular outcome

The phrase "conflict of interest" refers to someone making a wrong choice with respect to someone who is not himself, on the basis of wanting a particular outcome for himself. It may overlap with skin in the game, but it's different.

Here are some relevant definitions via Google:

Gender Identity: A person’s deeply felt, internal sense of being male, female, or something entirely different (such as non-binary, genderqueer, or agender)

Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and norms that a culture associates with being a man or a woman. While often conflated with biological sex, it is distinct; sex is assigned at birth based on biology, whereas gender encompasses an individual's internal identity and societal presentation.

You hear this argument:

"who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."

so much because, by those definitions, that is what gender / gender identity is. If you accept those definitions then its not even an argument, its an extension of the definition. You cannot by those definitions have any input on that person's gender / gender identity as it is solely that own person's feeling.

Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?

If this was any other form of identity then maybe, but again it comes down to the premises accepted. If you accept the definitions the conclusion is foregone, it is smuggled in.

As with everything trans related you will get a much clearer picture by questioning the premises and definitions set forth by the troons than by arguing within them. Don't argue within a frame that is incoherent and solely made up to bamboozle you, reject the premises.

If you flip flop from one thing to another, with every time it being something new, like a kid who doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up then I don't think that's reliable.

But if you consistently think about something but then find a reason not do to do it, until it comes up again in the future, then I would say that counts. If you want to be a girl as a kid, a teen, a young adult, and an adult, and is a persistent nagging that you can never get rid of, only suppress temporarily then it can be something else.

But really the biggest factor is also simply doing something. Not just wishing to be a girl, but going about doing that. Actually learning makeup, how to dressing well, and voice training to speak more femininely.

Obviously there's persistent thoughts that should be suppressed for the social good, but in general, transitioning doesn't harm anyone else, so if it improves your quality of life, it's fine.

But if I had a trans-like belief that "I know what I am, but the world won't let me be it," with tons of people telling me over and over that I'm right and there are evil people out to get me, I think I'd have latched onto it hard.

I mean, factually people are out to get you if you're trans. It is a choice that will lower your future life prospects in many ways. People will shit on online far more than if you're just a man. As a man you're invisible, as a transwoman you're a living example of the culture war.

If you don't pass, you will be judged for it, and will likely get less/worse jobs and worse dating prospects as a result. Some things like professional sports will essentially be cut off for the rest of your life.

In general, considering the cost of the act, if you feel bad enough that it outweighs all these risks, I see no reason why I would be against transitioning, and calling people by whatever pronouns they want.

If you don't pass, you will be judged for it, and will likely get less/worse jobs and worse dating prospects as a result.

The same is true if you cover yourself with tattoos, or get a billion piercings and blue half-shaved hair. The reason this happens isn't because you're trans, it's because you look ridiculous. It used to be trivially understood that, in polite society, you should put some effort into making yourself presentable. It's doing trans people a disservice to pretend that this norm shouldn't apply to them (when it always will - it's human nature).

Okay, I'll bite. Why are tattoos, numerous piercings, or a dyed undercut inherently ridiculous? Genuinely.

It's because almost all of them are damned ugly, and putting effort into looking ugly is ridiculous.

We all have some sympathy for people who can't be bothered to groom or control their weight. Not a lot, but some. But lesbian haircuts, weird face piercings, ugly assymetric tattoos? Genuinely why?

I think I sounded more judgmental than I needed to be. This is very culture-dependent, obviously, so there's nothing "inherently" ridiculous about tattoos or piercings. And maybe all of your milieu think it's perfectly normal. Hell, in rationalist/autistic subcultures, even acting like a woman with a masculine build and voice might not stand out overmuch (though it gives me the willies). But the post I was replying to was talking about getting jobs with normies, and they will absolutely think these things are ridiculous.

(Also, like @5434a said, if you and your friend group are doing it just to reject norms and stand out, well, having more trouble getting a job/partner is the entirely-predictable cost you pay for "rejecting norms" and "standing out".)

If you deliberately make yourself look different it's unreasonable to expect that you will be treated the same. There are others but one of the common responses to people who look different is ridicule.

Signal = "unalike"
Response = "yes"

Ridicule is more likely when the signal appears inauthentic or incongruent.

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