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A Look into Hickman, wherein a Sensitive Young Man discovers the positional utility of money
Link the relevant tweet
I've written about Hickman before because I find him to be a very interesting character. This is a man who was purposefully homeless for years, a self-described constantly drunk anarchist, who then joined the coast guard to clean up his act, become a kind of hardcore catholic that doesn't quite fit neatly into the Online RadTrad mold, got married, had a kid, and now, apparently, self-supports via writing online. He's also something of budding real estate investor.
And although he still "hates money" he just can't deny that it's got some pretty nice features; like being able to live in good neighborhoods where your kids are safe as well as being able to choose the rough outline of your socio-political environment.
Hickman's journey isn't unique overall. It's definitely got a lot of color to it, of course. I see it, however, as a pretty normal process of becoming aware of second order social effects. As kids, we're inherently self-focused. Adolescence brings some awareness of things outside of ourself. Young adulthood continues that up to family formation. For most, however, it takes the actual having of children to ignite thoughts about the beliefs, behaviors, and opinions of larger groups of strangers.
Being 25 and single or dating means I have more or less complete control (or perceived control - memetic influence is for a different thread) over the ideas I let effect me. But a parent realizes that short of keeping their children locked up in the basement, their ability to totally control the kid's ideological intake is far from complete.
It's unremarkable to point out that what happens next is people use a combination of money and social organization to choose and maintain the ideological ecosystems within which their children live. Money can get you access to the right zip codes and/or private schools and clubs / sports. Social organization can get the right (wrong?) books banned from the public libraries, and the right (wrong?) drag queen story hour performers. Enter the ongoing culture war.
The interesting thing, to my mind, that Hickman's post illustrates is the reach of these topics. Hickman, although not living on the street anymore, is certainly on the fringe of "normal" society. He's a very-online yet pseudo Amish dirtbag Catholic who lives in dying upstate NY. Yet is talking in the same direction that leads to HOAs, school boards, zoning, planned communities and all the other things that are top of mind for the most milquetoast suburbanites. Short of a true EXIT mentality, you can't not be in the culture war.
And I think there's something useful here to contemplate in terms of the very Vibes based general feeling of anxiety that generates thousands of thinkpieces across main stream and alternative media and internet outlets. If many of us feel like non-voluntary conscripts in the culture war, it follows that we're fighting the war just to survive and get back home. But then the question becomes "what the hell is home?" There's no 40 acres and a Good Wife (TM) to walk with into the sunset. The HOA has problems with our lifestock and Wifey is at therapy and thinks we need to have a conversation about emotional labor. Or, for my progressive friends, the need to return that 40 acres to the indigenous rightful owners is really getting difficult because of the tax implications of the real estate sale and my polycule keeps breaking up while I'm talking to my lawyer.
Of course I'm having a little fun here, but the point stands; the political dream of the West post World War 2 was that a mix of economic and political liberality could ultimately result in an appreciable degree of autonomy for, at least, an individual if not a family. That no longer seems the case and there's been no real alternative identified. On the left, it's a kind of utopic socialism that can't ever actually work. On the right it's a very vibes based "RETVRN" ethos with some nihilstic streaks.
An FYI re: Hickman’s claim: it doesn’t seem like income is a foolproof way of preventing transgenderism per a 2025 study. $50,000 to <$75,000 household income has about same odds as $200,000 or higher. Probably the best bet is to ban effeminate anime at home and give child a more exciting identity and “quest” to latch onto in adolescence. I looked and there doesn’t appear to be a relationship with religiosity in household either.
FtM or MtF transgenderism? These are meaningfully different things.
That study didn’t separate the two. IMO anime and similar media plays a role in causing MTF, I have no idea what causes FTM though
Surely all the LGBT stuff in schools and the internet valorizing trans for being brave, coming out with their real selves is the real cause, plus those groomer discords. US military service is heavily correlated with transgenderism (about 2x general population) and that's presumably because of all the LGBT propaganda in the US military.
Anime doesn't even have a pro-trans message on the whole? Maybe hentai/gooner stuff but anime on the whole seems to cater more for straight men. And if anime were the main cause, wouldn't there be the most trans in Japan or Korea or China where they're way more into anime?
Then again, I don't watch much anime. I watched some of the most normie shows like Edgerunner, Hunter x Hunter, Death Note, Frieren, Kill la Kill. The only thing I could think of is the saga of Tanya the Evil which has a genderbent protagonist but its core idea is 'wouldn't it be cool if there was a dubiously sane evil loli flying ace fighting for not-Germany in not-WW2?' and deliberately desexualizes Tanya. Maybe there are other anime that are what you're thinking of.
For the sake of visitors who have no knowledge of the show I'd add that the protagonist is 'genderbent' only in the sense that a dickhead atheist salaryman dies in a traffic accident in present-day Japan and then God decides to resurrect his spirit in the body of a female infant born in an orphanage at wartime in a monarchy that is basically a stand-in for Imperial Germany but in a parallel universe (I suppose) in the past, the purpose being to teach him a lesson on fate, divinity, morals etc. We see Tanya grow up to be a child who is discovered to have magical powers that are useful in combat and is thus recruited to the imperial armed forces. It's more correct to say that she isn't sexualized in the first place (nor is any other character for that matter) because, well, she's a pre-pubescent girl. So bringing it up as an example of gender-bending is a bit of a stretch.
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For a long time you could join, transition, and the military would pay for your hundred thousand dollars of surgeries.
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Anime is actively anti-trans, but don't tell BreadTube that. (Or maybe do; I'm tired of the shitty takes.)
What they usually miss is the fact that most cross-gender characters aren't trying to make it everyone else's problem, which is the root of the issue that most people have with the subject (including, or complicated by, the excitement derived therefrom, including the sexual aspect thereof).
I found Ranma 1/2 to, interestingly enough, be a relatively good example of that. It is incredibly anti-trans; Ranma sees gender-changing as a disability (except when it's convenient to distract enemies with boobies) to be removed or worked with at best rather than something to heavily embrace. If I recall correctly there's one arc where he does discover a way to undo it, but ultimately chooses to destroy it for Akane.
That's not something you'd ever see in modern "trans-affirming" media. But then again, "anime has gender fuckery therefore it causes transgenderism" is the low-information version and generally outs the speaker as someone who's either not paying attention or is unwilling/unable to understand sexuality beyond the base level. [Which is also why all of the reactionaries are, correctly, dismissed.]
Ouran High School Host Club is kind of the same way, but Haruhi's father is basically a walking stereotype who retains most stereotypical male attitudes and Haruhi herself is... more of an accidental pick-me[1] more than anything else (Western women complain about tonal whiplash with respect to Kyoya- but that's caused predominantly by initial confusion about it being a story about a Modern Liberated Woman due to its initial premise, so those who liked it specifically for that are thrown far harder out of the story).
Kodaka's works are a bit different for a reason I really don't want to get into (I suspect this to apply to Tetsuka purely based on how his art looks, and subject matter that has a lot to do with gender-changing, but I haven't seen it so I can't positively draw that conclusion), but Chihiro actively treats femininity as instrumental and Halara Nightmare is the mirror image of that (where she intentionally confuses the issue and uses androgyny as that instrument instead- or basically, how one would imagine a non-uncanny trans person taking advantage of the privilege to use mis-identification as a scalpel rather than the traditional social sledgehammer Western audiences appear to prefer).
[1] I mean this more in the sense that she just happens to find herself in -> get along relatively well in a niche with a bunch of boys, not that she's doing it intentionally.
From how the character looks I believe this assessment is correct (I haven't watched the show).
Topically for transgenderism, though, there's a particular 'you only think it's desexualized because what the sexualization actually is won't be coherent to you' thing that over time people (particularly men) might hopefully be starting to understand. Steven Universe does it with the 'fusion dance', but most people get frame-trapped by seeing the Fusion dances, going 'it's obviously sex, they're teaching kids to have sex', and ending the scan there.
Because yeah, it is, but what you're missing is that the interaction is about as physically sexual as piloting a Basilisk from Cyberpunk 2077 is (I'd say it's more Pacific Rim, but I'm pretty sure Gypsy Danger isn't used for sex); it depends far more on emotional state to function correctly (who's actually leading is, if I recall, a question the show avoids) and a bunch of other stuff that's only coherent if you're willing to observe sex as women do. But we've talked about that before.
...you're not going to mention the Siamese? Thailand is famous for its ladyboys, and they didn't even need anime for that!
I'm pretty sure the better relationship with crossdressers Asians have has more to do with the fact men and women there look a lot more similar than they do in other races (and women look way younger for way longer); the more sexually dimorphic a particular race of people, the worse of a relationship with adopting the trappings of the other gender the cultures they create have.
I'm pretty sure mentions of this are just crypto-feminist (more typically labelled "social conservative") psyops trying to discredit perfectly normal things, like talking to young people, because they might see ur peepee or ur boobies and then u will explode, oooooo spooky.
You have failed your opposite-sex young adult offspring if the only sexual outlet they have is strangers on the internet. The corresponding responsibility to your right of veto over your child's sexuality is to actively search for situations where they can get laid. Because if you don't, they conclude they never will and decide to become the wo/man themselves.
While I mostly agree with the fact that there's a lot of transgender transformation media that manages to be sexual for a person with a particular kink or fetish without registering as sexual to most of the population, I also think there is a risk with this kind of speculation.
To use an ancient example by way of analogy, look at the animal transformations in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In particular I want to focus on the motif of voice throughout the poem (translation A. S. Kline):
Ovid focuses on the voice, and the lack of it in transformed people a lot throughout the poem. But why is he doing it?
I think there's a temptation for a modern person who is aware of the wide variety of kink content online, particularly transformation media, to speculate as to whether this isn't essentially ancient transformation porn. On this reading, Ovid keeps coming back to the lack of voice that results from a bestial transformation because this is the part that is hot to him, the part where a superior human being is made lesser, and thus, in a pattern that mirrors BDSM, hypnosis/mind control content, etc. the part where Ovid places himself in the mindset of a dom looking down on his literary subjects.
But there is obviously another explanation. That Ovid had a normal, non-kinky interest in transformation stories, and he chose to focus on the lack of voice in ex-human animals because that was one of the most salient differences between a human and an animal in his mind.
We will likely never know which of the two explanations is more directionally true.
But this kind of applies to all media that isn't obviously sexual, while appealing to a subset of the population due to their particular kinks. Plenty of mainstream stories feature body swaps (Freaky Friday being the most famous example), but body swaps are also a popular subject in kink. Short of an author or group of authors just coming out and saying, "This is a kink thing, we're writing kinky porn that only looks non-sexual because you're normal and this doesn't turn you on", there are going to be many examples where a cigar is just a cigar, and no intentional kinkiness was actually intended by the author.
It could go either way.
Transformation fetishes are probably more common in the general population than you would expect.
I thought R. L. Stine's Goosebumps books were fire when I was a little kid (like pre-pubescent). I didn't even know at the time that the animal and monster transformation scenes were giving me (proto-)sexual feelings. I just knew that I was very fascinated by them, for reasons I couldn't articulate.
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I haven't seen Ranma or the other anime you mention, so point taken I guess.
Good point.
Why can't they just be incels/volcels and chill out? A part of me is constantly reading headlines (like Cornell or some repulsive novel STD) and thinking 'another incel W.' My second vaguely crypto-feminist opinion is that society is oversexualized, obsesses about sex far too much. It's OK to not have sex. There's nothing special or life affirming about penetrating, often through rubber, an orifice. A lot easier to just crank one's hog. Only reproduction is actually special. It's terrible to shred one's entire life and maybe undertake gruesome surgery in pursuit of a sexual identity, to sacrifice so much for so little. The rapist who ends up in prison for a decade, the gay man who gets an STD from his bathhouse orgies and dies young, these people who try to become the wo/man - addicts. The high isn't even that good.
Maybe we need more Greek statues with tiny penises to remind people that the sexual aspect of civilized man should be controlled rather than vulgar.
And there are parts of discord/perverse hentai communities that try to worsen this, at the extreme end. There's definitely a corruption angle going on. I've seen the edges of it in various parts of the internet, something quite distinct from normal talk. Consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization) people, chaotic evil. There are others not quite so bad but still really bad out there. I don't think that every random discord server needs this intrusive surveillance crap to counter them but there are real issues going on there, the chaotic-evil brigade is on the march.
In plain English I think "to actively search for situations where they can get laid" in this context means that you as a father and husband are supposed to socialize with other couples of your age and social status with children that are of the same age and of the opposite sex as yours. Isn't that just a part of normal family life?
Less than you think. Parents can be introverts as well, or misfits in other ways.
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These are the punching bags of most media. Almost everyone looks down on a man who can't get laid, including other men who can't get laid. Trans-girls get access to an accepting community and an overall more positive identity.
If monkhood was a bigger thing in the west, then that would be a good alternative. "I am depriving myself of carnal pleasures to get closer to the divine" would be a positive identity as well. But alas, that is not an option for most.
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This was maybe the case through the 00s, but there are modern examples now like Onii-chan Wa Oshimai that are decidedly pro-trans, or at least trans-neutral. Onimai is definitely not a kids' show though, and it's not the sort of thing that children would randomly stumble onto by chance, unlike how say, a child in the 90s/00s might randomly have been exposed to other "effeminate" anime like Ranma or Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura (granted, everyone is given open access to the internet and Discord from birth now, so, you never know).
The funny thing about Kodaka's games is that they're just a bit... zesty, in general (and this has only ramped up over time with Hundred Line and Shuten Order), and thus have attracted a very large tumblr/fujo type of fanbase in the west, despite being ostensibly targeted at a mostly male audience.
Yeah I'm really fascinated by this. This is a common phenomenon whenever genderbender media breaks containment and gets some mainstream exposure. There were many confused comments online about Onimai, ranging from "why isn't he more pissed off at his sister for doing nonconsensual medical experiments on him and turning him into a girl? That's assault" (lol) to "it's a serious story about the struggles that young women face in adolescence" (infinite omega lol). The answer to all that of course is that you're not supposed to think that hard about it because it's essentially porn; it's just, porn that's transmitting on a frequency that you're not tuned into.
Tanya I can confirm is totally desexualized though. The genderswap is just a plot device to get the story going and then it's essentially never brought up again. There are quite a few isekai and other stories like that now.
I mostly agree with you. I think a lot of people are just genuinely, sincerely flabbergasted by the idea that anyone could ever desire to be the opposite sex, unless they were coerced into thinking that way by external circumstances, and "it's all discord grooming" is their attempt to proffer some sort of explanation that they can make sense of. I don't think grooming plays nearly as big a role as some other people here do.
That being said. I was deadass talking to someone just the other day who told me "this guy in a Rust discord convinced me to start taking estrogen". I'm 99% sure they weren't memeing. They were a couple years into their transition. So my reaction was 1) of course it was Rust lol, and 2) sometimes the conspiracy theories and most damning accusations about your political opponents simply turn out to be true.
This part I don’t really agree with though. I’m a consistent anti-egalitarian to the end. Broadly speaking, if a male can’t get laid on his own, then he shouldn’t be having sex; social engineering efforts to the contrary would be dysgenic. (Although I still support monogamous marriage as a preferable social order over polygamy, and I don’t feel particularly inconsistent in doing so.)
Rust, the game, or Rust, the programming language?
The latter makes more intuitive sense, but I could believe either.
The language.
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You know what being MtF and a Rust enthusiast have in common?
It’s the goddamn autists at it again.
Yeah, I was thinking about the link between autism and transsexuality recently. (I almost prefer to use terms like "spergy" or "spergy personality traits" over "autistic", because I'm somewhat skeptical about the existence of autism as a legitimate diagnostic entity, and at any rate most of the people who call themselves "autistic" don't seem to me to have any serious diagnosable disorder; they just have personality traits that are outside of the norm, that's all. But I'll continue to use "autistic" to mean "people who generally have spergy personality traits, at any degree of severity".)
One thing I noticed from my admittedly limited sample of talking to autistic women is that their speech patterns and thought processes are very close to those of autistic men in many ways; they experience many of the same struggles as well (personal, social, etc). The gap between autistic men and autistic women is noticeably smaller than the gap between normal men and normal women. This got me to thinking that, if an intrinsic part of autism is a decreased desire/ability to express highly differentiated sexual behavior that would be typical of one's birth sex, then both autistic men and autistic women might be more likely to experience a less defined and more fluid sense of gender identity (almost like they got thrown into a "third gender" bucket together) and thus might be more likely to be drawn to transsexualism.
I don't think this is a complete explanation or anything; at the very least there's still something uniquely malebrained about the whole phenomenon of MTFism; but I still felt that it was worth noting.
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