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songs about buildings and fooddiscussion of trans matters, this time courtesy of Freddie deBoer. First of, let me say I appreciate Freddie's writing. I think he often has sensible things to say, particularly in his own field of education, and offers necessary criticism as a leftist who is on the left.That being said, he is just as prone to the shibboleths of his side as we on the right are to the shibboleths of our side. Having seen how the progressive agenda around education is a steaming pile of what makes the roses grow, because he's been there and he's seen how the theory does not correspond with reality, I don't understand how he then falls into line with the rest of the progressive activism around other matters. But then, we all have our blind spots.
He wants to compare transgenderism with transracialism, and how one is real and valid and the other is a fake, but then he comes out with lines like this:
Well then eff me, Freddie, if it's not genetics and it's not physiology and biology not real, what is gender identity tied to?
Maybe... feelings? I feel like a woman?
Then why isn't it possible to feel like a black woman? To have that same yearning about identity and conviction that what you are "assigned at birth" is not the truth of what you really are?
He does not seem to have seen the arguments in some quarters that the term "trans woman" should not be used, that it should simply be "woman". After all, trans women are women. Maybe he hasn't encountered the nuttier fringes of the "trans movement" as yet.
Yeah, I absolutely don't disagree there. He sings along to the chorus like a good right-thinking person on the right side of history. But maybe those who don't hold the conventional progressive position aren't all dishonest or activated by unthinking bigotry and prejudice? Something to think about.
Anyway, this is mostly to present a reasonable leftist and what they think the trans movement is all about, and how their experience may or may not line up with what other people have experienced. In the middle of the screeching harpies, it's hard to remember that on both sides of this question are people who are genuinely trying to do their best.
Which is an interesting shift: I remember "Transgender people's brains resemble those of their self-identified gender" being an argument for trans rights no more than 10 years ago.
Just getting people to openly admit to this would be a win. They will not admit to this. They will not admit that it was what the narrative used to be. They will not admit that it's not the current narrative now. I cannot imagine a Good and Righteous person even responding to the question, because the question is inherently 'problematic, racist, and transphobic'. Always remember to ask people if they think that trans folks have the brain of their self-identified gender, and if this can be validated using fMRI or whatever. Just ask. Record answers if you can. Share. We need to see what the mind virus is fever dreaming now.
I remember this too and it being one of the things that actually was a good swaying argument to me about someone using HRT to treat their dysmorphia. I used to listen to Loveline a lot and Dr Drew would talk with people who would say transgenderism is people being sickos and he would talk about how there were studies showing mri images of a patient's brain before and after hormone therapy and how the HRT would change the brain from showing abnormal function to normal function after they started taking the hormones. I think it being a medical condition garnered a lot of sympathy for transgender people that they still want to keep while also denying that it's a medical condition that requires treatment, while they get treated, and I think they lost a lot of sympathy from people that can remember the before times.
The thing is, I'm not even sure this is mainly a bad faith thing. I've encountered several times, when talking about neologisms with people, that they simply don't remember things but the present and that knowledge just becomes always. I remember when "binge-watching" became a popular term and I was talking with someone about how it's weird how the term suddenly came into existence along with the topic as if we hadn't said the word "marathoning" before to mean the same thing. They were the same age as me and had no idea that it was called marathoning and made me doubt myself. I had an almost identical conversation about the term "lowkey" with someone who said it had meant what it does now in the 90s because that's what it always meant.
I think about 1984 and "always being at war with Eurasia" and maybe about how you don't have to actually rewrite history because nobody bothers (or maybe can or cares) to remember it anyway.
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Care to explain the reference? Is the album name a spoof on buildings and food being a common topic in the 70s musical zeitgeist?
It's not clear to me how the conservative agenda (at least in America) is much better, but we can let that potshot slide for the moment.
To perhaps offer a steelman, there are certain cultural practices and norms tied to gender that are essentially arbitrary in the modern environment. There's no inherent reason that women should be forced to shave their legs/armpits to be considered attractive, for instance, or that men shouldn't do the same. There's no biological imperative that men shouldn't be allowed to wear dresses, or makeup, or be considered submissive or cute. Ditto for being the majority caregivers after your child is more than a few years old, and earlier if you aren't breastfeeding. We long ago left the Hobbesian jungle of burly men hunting megafauna with stone tools, and physical strength is largely irrelevant in a world of Zoom meetings, work-from-home and knowledge economies. I'd argue that many of these gender norms have fluctuated throughout history. So what if someone identifies with a set of traits or characteristics that our society would typically associate with the opposite gender, regardless of whether this is caused by genetics/early childhood experiences or environmental exposures/'feelings' (themselves a product of all of the above, even if you try to use vocabulary suggesting that they are transient or unimportant)?
This in and of itself causes problems for people arguing that we should eradicate the gender binary entirely, and I haven't seen anyone square that circle convincingly. I'm personally more particular to those worldviews where most gender norms should be abolished and trans identity is more of a kludge in response to society enforcing a binary, but I'm not representative of everyone on the left.
Frequent rebuttals to this argument are often rooted in evolutionary psychology or Chestertonian fences. Or, as you frequently argue in other posts, it's 'just a fetish' and/or sexual predators trying to sneak under the radar to rape people, none of which I find particularly convincing. You can point to trans rapists; but then again, so can I for most of your favored groups, and these niche cases don't invalidate the cause as a whole.
It does seem that society is undergoing some kind of upheaval in response to generations of Women's lib, and where the new equilibrium will fall, I can't say. Perhaps the optimum would be one where everyone could freely choose for themselves, and while most people would naturally occupy the gender roles the correspond to their birth, there wouldn't be any stigma or disgust associated with people who (for whatever reason) do not. But...that just sounds a lot to me like trans acceptance, no? There used to be a futurist transhumanism strain here that was more optimistic and trans-positive that has either been driven off or converted to conservative trad thinking, which is a shame.
It's not a bad question. My personal response would be that black women are typically viewed as less attractive, as loud, stupid, etc. externally by society, regardless of whether they personally identify with any of those traits as well as a shared cultural history/tradition that is frequently tightly intertwined with the history of racism, segregation, slavery, etc. in the west. Thus the many examples highlighted here like Rachel Dolezal and the fake native American women which are most often rooted in self-advancement or Munchhausen-like addiction to sympathy, no? A white man who likes basketball and rap is viewed by society as...just a normal man as opposed to transracial, whereas a black man doing the same is viewed significantly differently. Meanwhile, a white man who likes wearing dresses and makeup is certainly not viewed by society as just a normal man, thus the 'trans' identity and pushback against social norms.
There's also the everpresent (although perhaps less frequently explicitly expressed of late) undercurrent of a post-racial/gender GLSC future. Such a world could still have 'trans' people who are born one sex and express traits that current times would code as of the opposite sex, whereas black women would just be women with more or less pigment. Assuming we reached some kind of equality without racialized underclasses, and maintained it for at least several generations.
But I can recognize that the logic isn't perfectly airtight.
This reads like 'mainstream view bad!' boo-outgroup. Ironically (considering the second half of your statement), you act as if the only way one could hold mainstream views on LGBTQ issues is to be a self-righteous, intellectually dishonest NPC. Just as I don't believe that you are dishonest or bigoted, maybe consider that Freddie and I actually do spend some time thinking about issues and arrive at our own conclusions.
No, what I mean is that Freddie does exactly what he says he does: he holds the conventional, liberal to mildly progressive views on all the topics. And he shuts down debate in the comments because (1) he's fed-up of people starting up fights when trans whatever is not the topic of his post and (2) he holds the One Correct View and anything that clashes with it is wrong.
I don't think Freddie considers that his view on abortion might be wrong, or the other things he mentioned. So if his view is not-wrong, the opposite views must be not-right. And if they are not-right, then that must be a choice between Evil or Stupid as to why such people hold not-right views.
I don't think that the progressive view is that people can honestly hold dissenting views on abortion or trans rights or the rest of it, that it is all down to prejudice, bigotry, racism, homo- and transphobia and so forth. So I don't think Freddie is open to "I disagree with trans rights activism because I don't accept the foundational principles, let's discuss this" because he's put forward his position: trans identity is about yearning, not genetics, don't bother asking about biology or the rest of it, end of discussion.
This is not to say I think Freddie is Evil or Stupid or anything else, just that he's holding this view very tightly on the grounds that this is the view to be held as per being a good progressive, yet in other instances he can see where the progressive rhetoric fails and is not compliant with reality.
I have read, with my own lying eyes, a Substack article by someone who earnestly and sincerely wished to get their fellow liberals/progressives to communicate with anti-abortion people. First, to do this, they have to understand something: anti-abortion rights people really do think it's a baby. Crazy, I know, but there you go. So what we have to do first is explain to them that it's a foetus, not a baby, and then all the objections will be overcome!
That was a good faith effort, and it was so wide of the mark in its understanding that I was banging my head off the desk. Yes, all we have to do is explain to the abolitionists that the negroes are not fully human to the same extent we are, and all the pother and fuss will be over!
If some people feel "I really want to wear dresses and makeup and be uWu" then I'd be happy to expand the range of gender roles so they can be men in dresses and so the hell what, rather than turn it all upside-down to be "oh you must really be a woman!", particularly as a lot of women don't care about dresses or makeup or being uWu, and it's really fucking annoying to have your sex/gender identity boiled down to "sugar and spice and everything nice" after years of feminism struggling about "women are not goddamn teddy bears".
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Just want to strongly agree here. I used to love the transhumanism and space oriented optimism. I’ve tried to do my best to bring it up here and there, but it’s difficult! I’d love to see your posts on the topic if you have an inclination.
If only @self_made_human wasn’t busy with totally pointless endeavors like med school or something and could endlessly entertain us with his transhumanist ideas. Alas!
Thanks for the call-out haha. I'm very much entertaining people with said ideas, given that I'm writing a hard scifi transhumanist story as I speak. Haven't had much to add on that regard for the Motte, but you want brachistochrone orbits as a consequence of torchships, launch loops, space elevators, the sun turned into a deadly lazer, feel free to check it out.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum
(Oh and I'm thankfully done with med school, barring PTSD dreams for the past couple years. Now it's on the grind to end up a shrink for me!)
Nice! What does the name mean?
Ex Nihilo means "from nothing" and Nihil Supernum means "nothing above"!
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No? Trans acceptance requires that I adjust my worldview, and start seeing trans women as literally women, and clap with approval as biological males enter women's sports, prisons, domestic abuse shelters, etc.
If you want to advocate for an alternative form of trans acceptance where this is not required, then you're basically joining the club I'm already in. Welcome, fellow transphobe.
There used to be a strain of people arguing their points here, rather then going "people don't agree with me anymore, that's a shame".
More seriously - sure, I'll confess to turning my back on futurist transhumanism. If you think that means I endorsed "conservative thinking", so be it, though I think slapping broad political labels when discussing specific issues is a bit disingenuous.
And even if I switch back to my old futurist-transhumanist mode, how exactly does that make any of the problems with transition go away? We simply do not currently have the technology to change sex. Why am I required to ignore that fact?
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Futurist transhumanist here. I have no objection to gender transition in principle. If I lived in The Culture and could switch literally at will, I'd probably try it for a while despite being quite comfortable as a straight, gender-conforming (nerd subtype), cis male.
However, the reality is that medical transition at the current level of technology is dangerous, expensive, irreversible, often unconvincing, and can have life-altering side-effects like sterility or permanent dependence on elaborate medical intervention. Medical transition flows from trans identity. Against this dark background, promoting the concept of trans identity, rather than simple acceptance of gender non-conformity, is irresponsible. Promoting this concept to minors as if cis and trans are just two equal choices (or trans is even better — braver, more special, etc.), is wildly irresponsible.
The fact that such a large fraction of people who present at gender transition clinics have serious mental health conditions should be a huge red flag here. A lot of people will likely choose to be thinner in a transhumanist future, but that doesn't make me want to celebrate bulimics as transhumanist pioneers.
On top of this, we've got the social demands of the trans movement. The insistence that e.g. someone who appears male and has male-typical physical abilities must nonetheless be recognized in all social respects as female doesn't fall out of technological transhumanism. I would go so far as to say it's at least somewhat at odds with it. Technological transhumanism is deeply materialist and concerned with physical intervention in the human condition. The primacy the present trans movement places on some inner essence of self-identity, incongruent with physical reality, doesn't sit comfortably within such a framework.
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One of the problems with this stance is that gender roles are not the same as behavioral preferences. Behavior in a liberal society is only very loosely constrained and not in many ways to actually limit gender nonconforming expression. As far as I can tell there are no serious attempts to stop adults who would like to behave like the opposite gender from doing so. But gender roles and the carve outs in society made for men and women are socially negotiated and these negotiations are about, because of and inseparable from biological differences. We didn't decide to divide the human race in half arbitrarily, we did so because males and females have very real differences and all the roles/expectations/carve outs flow from these differences. If you remove the fundamental grounding of those difference then you remove the fundamental purpose of those gender roles and the entire enterprise undermines itself and collapses. If we accelerate this trans thing, perfect acceptance in a few years, then the roles will be running entirely on the momentum of the past and eventually, inevitably, collapse.
As far as the transhumanist futurist strain, I'm still here, I still believe we can improve ourselves to super human. But if one takes this seriously and tries to look into the future that this movement is building for us I cannot help but notice it's a incoherent mess of people just being mistaken about practically every element of the human condition. You cannot build a proper transhuman future with such a confused understanding of humanity.
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Absolutely.
That still doesn't imply that I should be forced to affirm that somebody with a penis is a woman just because they don't like traditionally masculine behaviors or prefer traditionally feminine behaviors.
This feels like beating a dead horse at this point, but it really all boils down to what information people expect the words "man/male/he/him/his" and "woman/female/she/her/hers" to convey. I want "woman" to mean "a biologically female human being with two X chromosomes and a vajayjay", and "man" to mean "a biologically male human being with XY chromosomes and a dong". Hermaphrodites and people with oddball chromosome configurations are so rare that our language doesn't need to account for them, and as far as I can tell they're not the ones at the forefront of the campaign to redefine those word clusters.
I have no problem if a man wants to wear clothing that is traditionally feminine and prefer knitting to video games as a hobby, or vice versa. Men who have more feminine interests and expressions and women with more masculine interests and expressions have always existed. Like, I see what you're doing there, girl with short hair and baggy clothes. You're de-emphasizing your femininity for whatever reason. I can still tell you're a girl. You're not fooling anybody. You also don't need to put "enby/they/them" in your Twitter bio or change your name to a gender-neutral or male one for me to figure out what your deal is. You can dress and groom yourself however you like, and nobody should harass you for it, and they should treat you the same as they treat anybody else in public-sphere interactions (teacher-student, employer-employee, customer-server, etc.). None of that means that you're not female.
Now, I feel like I have to acknowledge that there are definitely cultures, both past and present, that are much less tolerant of "deviant" behavior along these lines. Parents yelling at their boys for playing with dolls instead of army men, and vice versa. I feel like that is just a specific case of intolerance for misfits, which I believe is wrong and should be prevented. But the solution to "men who like to knit get made fun of" isn't "okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".
"okay, then change your name to a female name and start insisting that the world treat you like an actual woman".
Are we sure? That is an actual solution (though there are others of course). If you accept (as you appear to) that is should be ok for a man to fulfill all the social roles of a woman then a way to signal that is to dress, act and use the same words that are used for a woman. There is a built in set of words and roles that fit what he wants and that is much easier to utilize than creating a whole new categorization process and getting the world to accept it. It's easier to step into a role that already exists than create a new one. Even the word tomboy gestures in this way no? A girl who behaves like a boy would be expected to is called a tomboy. A man who acts like a woman perhaps used to be called a sissy (and still is in some circles) but if you want it to be socially accepted then is trans-woman really all that different? And is a trans man who doesn't actually get surgery or hormones and just socially transitions (the most common approach) really any different than a tomboy?
The directional goal of the saying trans-women are women (or trans men are men) and to treat them as such is to remove the social shame, which you agree should be removed. There are other avenues of doing so, but this one builds upon the existing rails so to speak.
This is one of the clash zones with Radical Feminism, which (generally) holds that those social gender roles/words/themes/ should be torn down in the first place. There are other trans people hold similar views (non-binary and the like) which is one of the fault lines withing the trans community itself.
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Many gender norms are amplifying existing sex differences. Eg men are naturally hairier than women, shaving exagerates this
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Are you sure about that ? You think sexuality is entirely environmental, there are is no genetic component to it ?
That's bullshit.
The fundamental asymmetry between male and female genetic interests has been there essentially forever. Submissive men do exist, but they're more rare than the other way around.
And as to cute... ditto. Men aren't cute. You can try to 'consider' them cute, but that's the same level of as talking about feminine penises.
With all due respect ma'am/sir, misstating my argument and then rebutting it with nothing more than 'that's bullshit' is remarkably poor form. But anyways:
Sexuality typically refers to sexual attraction/orientation, which I only tangentially mention.
I don't assert that it is entirely environmental.
I'm not sure about anything. It's a worldview, and I'm open to changing my mind. You'll have to try a bit harder though.
I do believe that many of the things we're discussing happen to be largely environmental, though. Male preference for pants versus 'dresses' varies wildly across cultures; from kilts, thawbs, thongs worn by many tribal peoples, togas and roman tunics, whatever. So no, I don't believe men have a genetic imperative against wearing dresses, nor do I believe that women have a genetic imperative to find men in dresses unattractive. There are centuries of wildly different fashions and norms, even amongst Europeans who (presumably) share your genetic background.
Even if you just want to consider sexuality, I do believe that there is significant plasticity and environmental influence on what and who people find attractive. We oscillate between finding short hair on women attractive, to unattractive, to attractive ad nauseum. Repeat for most traits.
Speak for yourself, I find plenty of men cute. I suspect if you ask some of the women in your life they'll have plenty of examples of men they would describe as cute.
People constantly conflate gender/sex preferences that are culturally/socially contingent and those that are universal (and thus almost certainly biological in nature).
Some actors obviously do this in bad faith. Like the typical feminist/queer theorist who says 'pink used to to be for boys, blue for girls, now it's the opposite, thus proving all gender preferences are arbitrary and that the idea that women prefer people and men prefer things is also arbitrary and socially contingent!' Gotta love those huge non-sequiturs.
Really, you can seperate gender preferences (including sexual preferences) into three rough catagories - (1) things that are universally/biological, (2) things that are socially determined but are influenced and constrained by biology to some degree and thus are not completely arbitrary, and (3) things that are socially determined and are completely arbitrary.
Men liking things and women liking people is an example of number 1. It is universal and biological, and reflects the biological division of labour.
Most (historically) gendered clothing fits into number 2. Clothing still has to reflect the practical needs of each sex, which is in turn derived from the gender role (which in turn is derived from the biological division of labour). But there is obviously a significant degree of wiggleroom which is culturally contingent. An obvious example is the fact that women wear bras and men don't. This obviously isn't an arbitrary completely socially determined choice. Though the specific designs or styles of bras might be.
Colour preference for genders is an example for number 3. There is generally no compelling reason why certain colours should be assigned to either men and women. This is culturally socially determined (though I suppose someone could try to make an attenuated evo psych argument about how red is biologically masculine cause blood or some shit).
All this basically applies to sexual preferences too.
Sexual attraction to well defined, feminine hips might be an example of number 1.
Sexual attraction certain kinds of modes of behavior (e.g. stoic, dominant nature in men) might be an example of 2.
Certain kinds of decoration, such as tattoos might be an example of 3.
I'm not going to deny that there are certain behaviors or traits that are dominated by genetic influences (if we dropped a pair of children off on a deserted island and they made it to adulthood, I'm sure they could figure out how to propagate the species), and I do agree with what you say generally, however I do believe that even in your post you overstate your case.
What do you think the world would look like if from birth all the media men were exposed to showcased men as caregivers while women were out earning a living? Where their male role models were all stay-at-home dads taking care of the domestic duties and their female role models were breadwinners? To the extent that we're all exposed to this pervasive monoculture(ish) it seems to me that it's impossible to say just how far we could move the needle on what you're describing with (benign) environmental changes alone.
From my other reply:
I would say that would be pretty dysfunctional society that wouldn't be able to operate effectively, most people would be miserable, if it didn't just completely collapse on itself. Men and women would immediately (unconsciously) attempt to reverse that situtation if it weren't held together by powerful social engineering/political force.
If you don't like the hips example (you can socially engineer people to deny their most basic biological instincts), another example is youthfullness being sexually attractive.
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Men would watch less TV? For that matter, so would women probably.
Or if it's actually done well, they'd happily identify with the female characters, and not think about it twice, like they do with Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor?
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But waist and hips and well shaped ass is immutable.
You sure about that? I'm obviously not in a position to offer anything more than hearsay or anecdote, but there are plenty (possibly a majority) of modern models with tiny waists rather than child-bearing hips. Ditto with variation in preference for ass size.
The waist to hip ratio is usually the same on both types of models.
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Not sure how you'll take this but I've enjoyed this autistic rant that explains «models» by preferences of predominantly gay modeliers rather than median men or organic looks hierarchy of women.
Edit: I may be biased here. One of the most miserable women I know is a short, voluptuous and fairly inept girl who very reasonably guessed she could make an easy living with her looks (a few mutual friends have rated her 10/10, I'd say 9 is about right), but tried to achieve this through traditional modeling – which completely destroyed her self-esteem through comparisons with lanky scarecrows sporting chiseled cheekbones. Honestly, everyone likes to hate on onlyfans, but in her case it would have been better.
Wasn't this JuliusBranson's shtick? I've read it before and seem to remember him writing a long post about how ancient Babylonian porn proves evo psych arguments that liberals are ugly or something. May have been someone else. Funny either way.
That said, you don't need gay designers to convince normie men that the majority of the women on this list are attractive. A huge fraction of eastern European and Asian sex symbols buck your sex doll trend. Bill Gates and Papas Elon and Bezos who are all richer than G*d could easily have maximized for breast size and didn't.
The flip side of the 'sex doll' argument is that most modern men actively wouldn't marry a stacked girl with >double Ds and a huge ass given the choice because they aren't viewed as respectable. I believe our wiser forebears called this the 'madonna-whore complex.' Meanwhile, whispers from the lost generations living before the Great-Depression (or East Asian countries a generation ago) counsel us to marry someone with 'meat on their bones' and to eat heartily or nobody will find us attractive. All of which suggest that life is more complicated than a genetic drive for bigger ass and tits.
We could make up any number of bullshit evo psych arguments to fit the data. Or talk about barber poles and elites, changing material conditions and environment, the emerging matriarchy, Freudian impulses and Jungian shadow selves and so on and so forth. But my head would hurt and it would still be made up.
I don't think the majority of women on that list are very attractive. Like, at all. The only ones who stand out as notably attractive are Kate Upton and "Angelababy". Besides that, I can easily think of many women I've known in real life who I would rather sleep with before the women on this list.
I know that my own preferences aren't exactly the norm, but, generally women overrate how attractive models/celebrities are to men. There's clearly a specific type that's been selected for by the people who run this stuff, and that type is not to everyone's taste.
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While arguably not a normie, I am a man and I posit they're not exceptionally attractive. They have sometimes amazing faces and are all around okay, but this is despite them lacking feminine waist and hips (I don't mean Beyonce, Megan Fox and other celebrities who got on that list because of being actual sex symbols). I think we can learn more about male preference from actual, organically emerging markets. How prominent are women of this type among [some high percentile] Onlyfans? Among strip club dancers? Are these bodies present in escort girl catalogues? Do women photoshop themselves into that shape? Do they seek out clothes exaggerating those traits?
And how much effect does a typical male's preference have on who gets to the runway?
Seeing Japanese lingerie models, I very much doubt it. Asians may have less interest in bottom-heavy physiques, of course.
There's the notable "billionaire wife" meme, I think they didn't prioritize looks in any case.
I am not sure about that, and the idea that rail-thin (as opposed to just tall) women are inherently more attractive to the higher-status men is on par with the most hare-brained evo psych stories. A fit, non-sagging woman with bigger tits and ass wins, although of course there are trade-offs.
Sure, but I think we don't have to, because the data in all conditions where large numbers of representative men actively express their preference and are in a position to demand the subjectively best possible pick is overwhelmingly in favor of the blogpost's hypothesis, which you are unjustifiably dismissive of.
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Women are nowhere near as competitive as men, which means they get underpaid in the workplace.
Women are worse at cooperating than men, because friendships between women are harder and they are more prone to seeing each other as competition.
They're far more prone to use socially approved form of aggression (gossip, exclusion, etc), which doesn't help organisations either.
Furthermore, childcare is low status in society now, hence a man who is willing to forgo a career to take care of children will be seen as less attractive.
If you think you can just snap your fingers and fix this, no, it doesn't work like that.
So, women are less suited for workplaces, will make less money
There simply isn't. Male preferences through history are largely unchanging. Judging by pornography, not fashion which is subject to fads.
You find them attractive. You don't find them cute in the sense of you find kitten or babies cute. It's a problem of vocabulary.
Those are fads, not genuine preferences.
Apart from a very small amount of men with a fetish for short hair, or baldness in women, no one else thinks it's attractive.
Long hair are a good signal of health, same as firm breasts, same as shapely figure.
But is pornography not also subject to trends? I recall an article from years ago bemoaning that all big mainstream porn was trending towards "big dicks fucking big tits." And you'll also notice that moden porn has signifcantly less pubic hair in it than compared to the 70's. Culture is weird like that.
Can't comment on penis size, but this guy did a deep dive into the Internet Adult Film Database and found that, contrary to the widespread impression that most porn stars are buxom blondes, the "average" porn star is a brunette 34B. Granted that the study is from 10 years ago.
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Frankly those are irrelevant. Look at the woman's asses - there was never a popular pornstar with flat ass.
Looking at the most popular pornstars on this list, I can see plenty (https://fameregistry.com/).
Tori Black, Elsa Jean, Sasha Grey, Sunny Leone, Emily Willis, Riley Reid, Mini Stallion, Lulu Chu, Clara Trinity.
All of those first 5 had perfectly shaped assed.
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It's an album by Talking Heads.
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A rapist advocate for color blind racial policy doesn't invalidate color blind racial policy because rapists can't use color blind racial policy as cover for raping. There have been multiple instances of rapists using trans rights as cover for raping. And I have to say, if color blind racial policies did provide cover for raping, I would at the very least try to figure out a version of the policy that didn't.
Anyone can commit crimes while claiming any ideology. There's nothing about trans rights specifically that encourages rape.
And yet MtF trans want inclusion into spaces in which women are available and vulnerable. Even if it doesn't encourage it, is sure makes it easier.
Women are available and vulnerable basically everywhere. Trans women wanting to be in women's spaces axiomatically follows from them being trans women. This is insufficient fodder for an argument against trans rights.
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True, but this is not the complaint at hand--it's what is done with rapists that is at the heart of the dispute.
I beg your pardon, but my Google skills are momentarily not up to snuff. What is being done with rapists?
Some dude gets convicted for raping women. He's sent to prison. In prison, he discovers that he's actually a trans woman, and so needs to be transfered to the women's prison. The authorities go along with it. Women prisoners get raped by the "trans woman" rapist who is bigger and stronger than them, and has a fully-functional dick.
In that case, existing protections against rape in general should be enough. It shouldn't be difficult for the guards to observe creepy behavior leading up to any incident, for example. If the guards fail to prevent rape by a trans woman, then they would've failed to prevent any other sort of abuse between inmates. I continue to not see a problem with trans rights here.
Also, I don't think this is a problem, statistically speaking. I currently think every other possible sex offense that could go on in a prison is way ahead of this one in frequency. I would be interested in seeing some numbers on this. I am aware of some news articles on the topic, but see Man bites dog:
The existing protections, i.e. keeping male rapists away from women, is being actively subverted.
That's not how it works. I doubt you can prevent rapes simply by "observing creepy behavior". And even if you could, there's still the fundamental problem of legibility. Let's say a guard does in fact notice some behavior that they consider to be creepy. What do they do then? If they take any sort of disciplinary action it's not hard for one to argue that it's overkill and say just because there's creepy behavior doesn't mean a rape has been committed yet. It's the same problem as the cops being called to a domestic dispute, then being unable to do anything because they didn't personally witness anything illegal happening, and they can't just take someone else's word for it. This idea of recognizing creepy behavior sounds like one of those ideas that only makes sense in hindsight after an incident has occurred, yet isn't workable in practice.
Also, come on. Are you really suggesting that it's easier for guards to "just prevent rape" than it is to place trans women rapists in men's prisons?
This does not follow. There are all sorts of offenses a guard must prevent, and rape isn't equivalent to all of them in difficulty or observability. So them failing to prevent rape doesn't give us any information about what other things they have failed to prevent.
Besides, the easiest way to prevent men raping women isn't to have guards on duty. It's just keeping male rapists away from women.
Trans rights have resulted in demonstrable negative externalities to other people. These externalities would straightforwardly not have happened if there weren't trans rights. It's as simple as that.
Okay so, using statistics to triage the collective effort we spend on problems (and thus dismissing statistically insignificant problems) only makes sense if it would take too much effort to eliminate them. In this case however, the effort is relatively easy. All we have to do is not put male rapists in the same building as women. In fact, that's what we were doing before, until trans rights activists rolled around and demanded we do otherwise.
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They're being put in women's prisons, for example.
If rapists - people who have raped - are put in with the general population of prisoners, that's a failure in and of itself and doesn't have anything to do with trans people.
And if a male rapist is put in a female prison, then it's an even greater failure of the prison system, and it does have something to do with trans people.
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Freddie must suffer awful cognitive dissonance around this as how could you be heterodox and shun curiosity? Same goes for decoding the gurus. It's a hard time to be heteredox on the left if you already have an audience you have to structure yourself around.
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I have yet to see evidence that rape is a failure mode of trans rights specifically and not just human nature generally. To restate, being trans does not cause you to be a rapist.
Generalizations aside, among all strategies to reduce prison rape, putting trans prisoners in with their birth sex population is surely one of the least effective ones. Anything else is honestly more likely to eliminate the problem entirely. For example, getting the guards to stop raping the inmates will make them more effective at preventing rape among the inmates, including rape done by trans people.
Housing sex criminals separately would be another good thing to try. In some of the articles and stuff I looked at while writing this post, some people proposed we house trans sex criminals separately. But housing all sex criminals separately would obviously address the problem too. Even if we had limited space, severity of crimes would obviously be a better way to prioritize than being trans.
I guess some people see other people getting worried about prison rape by trans people and think they're calling trans people rapists. Obviously they're not, but it's still fishy. To focus on prison rape by trans people instead (and, observably, it's very much instead) of prison rape generally implies there's something special about prison rape when trans people do it. Maybe one argument in favor of such specialness is that we can apply a very straightforward intervention (no trans women in women's prison) and it straightforwardly gets rid of this one subcase of prison rape. But there are even simpler interventions that obviously work better, such as not housing sex criminals with everyone else. In summary, it's more effective to target the "rapist" part of "trans rapist" rather than the "trans" part.
Re people abusing self-ID, see answer downthread, which I shall copy-and-paste for convenience (please reply there):
Re guards, I find it straightforward that rapists foster rape culture, and non-rapists foster less rape culture. You might even get excellent RNG and get a guard who actively works against rape culture, but maybe that's a bit too much to ask for.
Re solitary, I did not intend that meaning: I just mean put all the sex criminals with each other. Yes, solitary confinement is pretty bad and should be avoided when possible.
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This is what is done in Ireland iirc. There are some sex offenders in every prison, but Arbour Hill is where they are concentrated as they have teams of clinical psychologists there to try and reduce recidivism rates.
Given the lack of female prisoners I don't think they have a specific place for female sex-offenders.
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In a world where none of these behaviors were coded as male or female, one could choose to land anywhere on the spectrum without being forced to identify as x, y or z. In my mind, the trans label is necessary insofar as we live in a society that does have the binary. I doubt this is a widely held view, although I also doubt that many people think that deeply on it without being pushed.
And to steelman the rebuttal to that, something like 80,000 prisoners are raped per year in the United States. Huge proportions of female inmates report being raped or harassed, correctional officers have storied histories of raping female inmates. Trans inmates are raped at much higher rates. When's the last time Tucker Carlson ran a segment about prison rape in general? When's the last time anyone here wanted to discuss anything other than the hyped-up rounding error that is men faking being trans to rape female inmates? It's easily possible that a policy allowing trans folks to transfer prisons would result in a net negative number of prison rapes given how often they're victimized in men's prisons.
Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.
Fair enough.
A fair question, but a difficult one to answer. 'No stigma and disgust' at least is independent of gender-segregated spaces, as it's easy to campaign on simply being more open-minded and affirming to people who want to dress/act/present themselves in ways that society frowns upon. I don't personally think I have a good answer to your second question and to the extent possible would defer to what women wanted.
I knew it was you, with a blackpilled name and slightly different writing style.
Frankly? I seriously wonder if you're right, particularly given the eye-popping numbers of trans teens right now. But I also wonder if trans acceptance becomes widespread and normalized we wouldn't see a decrease in the number of trans people as being trans lost it's luster of rebellion/counter-culture/righteousness and was treated like being a cis-gay guy in 2023.
Fair enough.
There are worse heuristics.
There is a fundamental difference between being stuck with a fucked system that no one actually knows how to improve, and inventing new forms of fuckery out of whole cloth. Male rapists getting themselves transfered to female prisons wasn't a problem we had before, and it shouldn't be a problem we need to expend much effort to prevent, given that we can, you know, just not do that. People are outraged about it because its advocates seem to be making the world a strictly worse place, for no reason but blind ideology.
That last sentence, though... the moral lacunae grow. I think you're dead wrong, but boy, do I understand the doomed logic of the argument.
...Put it this way: your best defense is that there might be a net-reduction in rape, because transgenders and transtrenders together have such high rape numbers. If it turned out to be the other way around, and this was just a straight increase in rape, would you agree it's a bad idea?
Really? Nobody on the left has suggested any improvements for the American carceral system, nor have they been extolling the virtues of European systems for years now? Issues like forced labor, chronic understaffing, murder and rape1 2 and so on and so forth are rampant. The first time I've seen anyone on the right express any kind of sympathy for the plight of prisoners was the J6 rioters.
Would you disagree with that characterization? Are there communities of conservatives decrying prison conditions that I'm unaware of?
The thrust of my argument is that I don't trust any of you on this topic because I think you're motivated more by anti-trans animus than compassion. You can't spend days talking about how trans people are ugly, disgusting, mentally ill freaks and then turn around and expect me to believe that You (the right) care for their wellbeing, just like You can't say things like FAFO/carjackers and rioters should be shot/prisoners experiencing rape and violence deserve it and claim some moral high ground. And so far, while all the replies reiterate feeling gaslit and frustration about being told that this would never happen, nobody has actually responded to that point.
You're acting like I'm dead set on allowing anyone into female prisons at any time for any reason. I don't personally have a well-thought out opinion on the issue; probably some screening based on whether they were living as trans outside of prison prior to arrest would be useful if messy. But even there, I strongly suspect the real reason most of you want that is to get a foot in the door for limiting the rights of trans people such that in the future you can say 'Well, look at the example of prisons! If you've already accepted these limitations on trans identity, why should I be barred from doing X?'
If you're appealing to my inner utilitarian. There's also an argument that the majority of trans people are malicious actors and should shoulder a higher burden of the externalities (OP's usual favorite hobby horse), but I've yet to see evidence of it.
And lastly, as I state above, I'd accept that you could probably do better than either with some very forgiving screening or a much smaller third set of institutions for trans people if you could get it past the 'trans women are women' crowd.
For what it's worth, while I am dead set against self-ID as a policy, I do think there are instances in which it may be appropriate to house trans women in female prisons. I outlined my preferred arrangement here, and I think it's a compromise that most reasonable people would find agreeable.
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No. Men wearing wigs so they can enter women's prisons was not an issue 20 years ago. You try to shift the blame around, but conservatives didn't 'suddenly' get concerned about prisoner safety, they are concerned because progressives did something which everyone knew would end up with men putting on wigs to enter women's prisons. It was ignored however, because of progressive ideology - those who said anything were threatened into silence.
So there is no sudden concern for the safety of inmates, there is just the long historied concern about putting a convicted sex criminal in a building with a bunch of women and whistling nonchalantly as you lock the door behind you. It is the fact that the outcome was 'fairly predictable' which outrages people, because you are basically saying that you see those rapes as an acceptable price to pay for advancing your dogma. You do care but you won't take those rapes seriously until conservatives care about other prisoners, or trans rights. How is that different from not caring?
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Or... you could just do it anyway? I never understand this. So society frowns on the thing you want to do. So what? As long as it's not literally made illegal, why would you possibly care? Why invent a whole new identity to justify doing the thing you want to do, instead of just doing the thing you want to do? And why, oh why, make it everyone else's problem and responsibility to go along with that identity and validate you in every possible way at every possible opportunity?
You know the answer. The trans condition is mired in insecurity. They don't need permission. They need validation.
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I'd go as far as to say as this should be entirely what we talk about. This isn't meant to throw any sort of shade at trans people, to make it clear, the intention is exactly the opposite. In fact, I think the argument should be made that this really doesn't have anything special to do with Trans people.
Someone on Twitter asked an interesting question, which was essentially, why is this topic so fraught? And the best answer I can give, is that it's the first topic (maybe) to be "born" in the forge of Postmodernism and Critical models of power at a popular level. Sure, they existed in academia before this, but I do think there was this divide between these ways of thinking and a much more transactional, retail, boots on the ground level productive politics. Frankly, it's possible that the other candidate for the "First topic" is COVID, and I do think you see a lot of the same patterns in that debate as well.
But this creates an activism, where anything less than everything is nothing. And I think that's what we see. And I'll be blunt. Even though I do think, on an instinctive level, that brain-body gender/sex mismatches make sense at the extremes...we're talking about more than that now. We're talking about people who internalize these Critical models of sex/gender and develop something approaching gender dysphoria (ROGD). We're talking about people who do this not from a gender, but from a sexuality PoV (AGP). And frankly, we're also talking about narcissists and sociopaths who understand the underlying power dynamics that come from these Critical models and seek to exploit them.
Covering for the latter is just going to drag down the whole thing. But that breaks kayfabe. That all the bad people are on one side and all the good are on the other. Frankly, same with the Critical model stuff.
That's where we are, I think.
Please help me understand this paragraph, because I'm having trouble. By "this topic" I assume you mean either trans issues generally or something more specific. If this topic was "born", what is it's "birthday"? 2020? 2014? 1969? Is the birthday when the public first becomes generally aware of the issue? How long has the "forge of Postmodernism and Critical models of power at a popular level" been operating? 2020, 2016, 2014...? What other topics might qualify as being a "first topic"? Russiagate? Gamergate? Brexit? Ukraine War?
I only ask these questions because it sounds like you have an interesting model, but I can't put the puzzle pieces together in my head.
To be frank, I think Gamergate was the "Dirty Bomb" that blew this model/culture of Critical Theory into the world. Or at least the reaction to such. It existed, to a degree, before that, but that's when I think it became fairly well known. So, when I'm talking about the culture of Postmodernism/Critical models of power, I do think that begins in 2015 or so. Maybe some people might look back to what happened to Operation Wall Street and take that into account..and they're not incorrect there to be clear, but I don't think support for that hit any sort of influential mass until the mantle was taken up by parts of the media/activist base, because it was being actively challenged for its own particular power/influence dynamics. Critical theory/Postmodernism is an easy "antidote" to those criticisms.
That's my opinion at least. And I think it's fairly obvious that Trans status as a mainstream issue came after that point.
But yeah, I think there's a reason that some people/communities hold on to Postmodernism/Critical Theory like a life vest that if they release they're going to fall down into the depths. And let me be clear...I don't think that's entirely wrong. I do think there's a legitimate self-interest at play here, even if frankly on the other hand I couldn't care less about said self-interest.
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Credit where credit is due, it's amazing that the trans community has gotten as far as it has with seemingly so little self-policing*. I have to wonder how it compares to previous civil-rights movements.
*Modulo conflicts like the truscum-tucute thing.
FWIW, my argument is that the topic itself doesn't really matter. And because of that you don't need self-policing, when it's all about power, essentially.
I wonder if that's going to make a comeback and break it up. Like I said, I think we're talking about at least 4 substantially different phenomenon here, and frankly, I think 2 of the 4 are much more innate than the others.
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It’s funny for a supposedly anti woke Marxist to not condemn the trans movement because it’s the ultimate example of what’s really an ultimate individualist and American philosophy.
However I see Freddie do this every so often, the last was a few months ago
The thing is, Freddie is a real live Marxist, which is part of the (far) left in American politics, but he otherwise has traditional leftist views of the remnants of the old socialist working-class type. So he doesn't realise that the Overton window has shifted past him, and he's being left behind on the wrong shore.
He's protesting for economic leftism, but the progressive leftism of right now (whatever about Occupy, which I thought at the time and continue to think was a steaming mess of clashing ideologies and even worse, no ideology, just 'let's protest and something something magic underpants gnomes profit! will happen') isn't interested in economics as such. Social liberalisation is way easier and cheaper to achieve, as all the formerly centrist-right governments (such as in my own country) discovered when they woke up to embrace the rainbow flag and legalise same-sex marriage. Instant popularity, doesn't cost a red cent to implement, the old problems of lack of housing and all the rest of it still remain but look - we've got Pride flags now!
So being a good old-fashioned leftist and liberal, he is exactly what he says - "conventionally progressive". So he thinks yeah, let trans people use the bathrooms they feel most comfortable in, yeah trans people aren't trying to trick anyone, they know they're not really changing sex, yeah let's just be tolerant and open and supportive.
And that's not enough any more. I don't think he gets the crazier extremes, so he just goes along with "well I'm not trans but if this is what trans people say, that's good enough for me". Hence the bits about biology - there is more to it that I didn't quote, and he does take the old line that sure, having XY chromosomes and a dick does indicate masculine biology which is how we identify men and the likes, but he just goes along with the line that the trans movement tells him they're taking.
So he's safe so far, but if he ever says the wrong thing (and it's very easy to do that right now), he'll be condemned just as harshly as if he had been one of the transphobes all along.
Ah! Populism. Truly the illness of the age. In some sense 1/6 and its doubly farcical Brazilian reenactment was exactly this same sentiment. People have been raised on stories of heroic figures who just needed to stand up to the evil dictatorship to have everything magically fall into place and a new dawn shine on the liberated victors of oppression.
Turns out politics don't work that way and protesting is worse than useless if you don't have any power. Maybe people will eventually take the hint but this is such a powerful and deeply ingrained delusion that I'm not holding my breath.
In some sense even the most hardcore cynics you'll find on the far left and far right still cling to it deeply within their soul even as they openly denounce it. I don't know that I've lost this magical intuition to "trust the plan" myself. Deep down I'm probably still hoping a secret cabal of 90s liberals can just fix everything and finally restore the glory of the Roman Republic.
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But it’s all crazy extremes, isnt it? If it was just “make getting a grc easier” the that would have been ok, but self identification is a clear extreme disaster.
And I don’t get how supposed rationalists don’t get that.
Because the motte of "XYZ is obviously bad" defends, as always, a more oppressive bailey: "so let's ban U, V and W just to be safe." The people who most loudly criticize self-ID are usually LGBT-unfriendly on various other issues. Maybe they thought DOMA was pretty great, or are on camera deadnaming someone, or sent their kids to conversion therapy. It could be for deep-seated beliefs, or it could be political strategy. Doesn't really matter. Why should trans supporters trust them to come to the acceptable compromise on GRCs?
It's more or less the same slippery-slope argument that gets deployed in reverse. Maybe a lesbian woman is capable of teaching kids, but what if she makes it sexual? Give an inch and those activists take a mile. They used to be aligned with pedophiles, too...next thing you know, they'll be defending MAPs in schools...better to cut this off from the start.
This is a negotiation tactic, and it's not unique to any one cause.
The people who most loudly criticize it are LGBT-unfriendly on other issues because an LGBT-friendly person has a lot more to lose by being accused of bigotry than a LGBT-unfriendly person, who's probably lost all that he could already and whose remaining friends and family won't care about the accusation. This situation is of trans supporters' own making.
It doesn't work in reverse unless the lesbian's environment is controlled by rightists who can easily make such accusations stick against even innocent lesbians.
I really don't think so. Fear of cancellation is not the deciding factor in the LGBT+ coalition. Either way, opposing self-ID is a pretty good predictor of opposing other LGBT policies. That means supporters are likely to cry "slippery slope!"
And yeah, that's exactly the environment I had in mind. Some employers clearly would fire people based on sexuality. I realize that Title VII preempts such an option, but it still shows up as a rhetorical strategy.
Really? Which other LGBT policies am I opposing then? Bonus points if you focus on the L, G, and B.
I dunno. How'd you feel about Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill? Was Bostock decided correctly? What about the whole cake-baking debacle?
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Or if you think opponents are using it as a wedge, in which case breaking ranks is going to slide the Overton window.
When was the last time you heard a gun owner say "oh yeah, the
suppressor tax stampbump stock ban is perfectly reasonable"? I'm sure people do actually believe this. But they're not speaking up about it because it is seen as a referendum on federal authority. There's no incentive to give up ground until pressed.So yes, the LGBT coalition makes it hard to oppose the wedge. Welcome to tribalism.
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It's not just that, but also fear of social stigma, as well as tribal loyalty.
When opposing X gets you declared a bigot, it's a lot easier to do it if you're considered a bigot anyway due to your opposition to Y and Z.
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It may be the deciding factor as to whether someone who is the coalition chooses to oppose part of it.
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I’m not sure that makes sense. The opposition to self identification is much higher than hostility to, say gay marriage. And trending in opposite directions. Outside of the US the primary opposition is feminists, which is clear from the acronym TERF.
And in the US the Christian right was anti gay anyway.
True, but I think that's normal for any policy issue with a spectrum of responses. The fringe pushes something extreme and the base either closes ranks or shuffles around uncomfortably. People who get too uncomfortable peel off to the other camps. Repeat until the fringe moderates or the opposition wins.
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No, a Weimar Republic philosophy.
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I saw it earlier today, but I didn't have time to read the whole thing. In any case I almost spit out my drink when I first read that line. What I want to know is how is it decided which identities can be disembodied, and which are connected to genetics and biology? Because, call me crazy, but if race gets to be biological, and gender does not, then it sure as shit doesn't look like the determining factor is the magnitude of biological differences.
Anyway, I'll get to reading the post, maybe I'll have more to say when I finish.
I also did not like him handwaving away the social construction model for race but allowing it for gender. He needed to make a much stronger case for that to make any sense.
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Not to be uncharitable to Freddie, but it seems to me that he's toeing the line here because he's blood-related to a trans person and trans activist. (Giving details about this person is probably against the rules, so I won't.) So, he simply doesn't want to be cut off from them. It's why every time he writes something about trans people, it just seems so intellectually hollow, like he's fundamentally refusing to question any of his assumptions and preconceived notions about trans people and trans activism, and just wants to go along with the flow to keep them happy. For example:
No, it doesn't discredit dialysis centers, radiology labs, or pharmacies in general. But, the first objection people take here is to the existence of adolescent transition in the first place. Ignoring that though, the bigger objection is that there's no feedback mechanism to root out and address these mismanaged clinics, and not only is there not one, people are discouraged from doing so and branded as "alt-right fearmongerers" if they ever attempt to call them out. It's a self-coordinating conspiracy (prospiracy?) that Big Pharma can only dream of. Big Tobacco is wishing people would've done the same for any anti-tobacco talk in the '90s.
And in general, it's like this for any proposal of the trans movement. You ask, what if men take advantage of trans identification to creep on women in the bathroom? You're told that that's not going to happen and you're just repeating a scenario that only originates in the minds of alt-right Nazis. Okay, then some men end up doing exactly that, so you ask what will be done about them, and then you're told that you're just making up lies and that they never actually creeped on women. Or, my favorite, that man is actually just a right-wing psyop to discredit trans people... so it did happen, but it doesn't reflect bad on the trans movement. Which is a really convenient way to avoid any blame for any of your implemented proposals. How about another one: You object that normalizing policing behavior against anyone deemed anti-trans (i.e. being a cop) is simply harassment and bullying that is legitimized under the guise of trans activism. "Well, uh, we tell them not to harass people, we don't condone harassment!" Okay, so a VTuber announces her intent to play Hogwarts Legacy and is immediately dogpiled to the point that she quits streaming. "All those harassers are just right-wingers in secret trying to discredit and kill trans people!" and "She deserved it anyways." You point out that detransitioners exist and go over why they detransition, and then:
Sigh. Should I go over how trans activists treat detransitioners in the first place? (Spoiler alert: Very poorly.)
Trans activists always react like this when something bad happens. Every single instance of trans policy producing bad outcomes is ignored, dismissed, or discredited under the fear that this legitimizes opposition to trans people and will threaten their lives. There's no mechanism in the movement itself to stop bad behavior, proactively or reactively, so the brakes are ripped out and the foot is pushing the accelerator to the floor. If that doesn't give you pause at agreeing with shibboleths like "trans rights are human rights", then I don't know what will.
I don't really want to blame Freddie, because no one is perfect at everything and there will always be some blind spot they'll miss. Still, for all his dissident writing, it's a shame he fell in line on the trans issue. For some far better dissident content on the excesses of the trans rights movement, I recommend Sophia Narwitz's video "Trans Activists Are STILL Their Own Worst Enemy".
I think you're right when it comes to Freddie's motivations here - it looks to me like he is already dancing close enough to the edge with his writing that he would not survive the eye of trans Sauron poring over his work for anything cancellable.
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What some of us scum and villains who hang out around wretched hives refer to as "That thing that never happens just happened again".
There's even a Tumblr blog named They Say This Never Happens. It contains quite a few instances of the thing very much happening.
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I wanted to talk about this one, but couldn't write anything dispassionate enough. Watching the narrative flip back and forth in real time was enraging, but it was so blatant that even redditors noticed and started quoting the "narcissist's prayer."
People keep saying things like "shooting themselves in the foot", but I don't see that. I see an exercise in total narrative dominance that's only strengthened by how indefensible the claims are. If even a contrarian like Freddie will bend the knee to it, how can it be a strategic error?
God, I also wanted to talk about this, but I figured it was too "rest of the Internet" for the Motte and I also figured I wouldn't have anything of substance to say.
The incredible levels of cope and blame avoidance had my mind wandering back to the discussions around the book Sadly, Porn, it's author The Last Psychiatrist, and his general fight against narcissism. Trans, cis, or whatever, there sure seem to be a lot of people in desperate need of admitting fault. The fact that people thought Silvervale's* "Twitter freaks" comment was a dogwhistle aimed at trans people and Jews was very much an "if you're reading it, it's for you"-type of thing, and if anything, I think it's only made the term "Twitter freaks" into more of a shibboleth.
The accusations of right-wing "gayops" smack so heavily of "big if true." I can believe that it may be possible, but if so, then trans activism has a bigger problem than a stupid wizard game if they can be reliably punked by 4Channers in such a way.
This and other events related to the general online trans community (and real-life stuff like Montana's recent bill) definitely seem like a string of PR hits for them, but it's hard to say if it'll actually move the needle on public opinion or just settle back down to the status quo.
*Silver is not the VTuber who is quitting streaming, for those unaware. That would be Pikamee, who was already planning on "graduating," but speculation says that the harassment may well have accelerated the plan.
I very sincerely doubt it's a possibility. There are plenty of people in the crowd dogpiling Pikamee who have internet presences dating back years, that don't seem to be fake (but I can't prove a negative). I have yet to see a convincing argument that the majority of people dogpiling were, say, avatarless randomly-generated usernames who joined Twitter yesterday.
Of course, the standard response to an argument against a conspiracy theory is to double down on the conspiracy further and postulate an even bigger conspiracy to cover up evidence of the conspiracy being a conspiracy. I have no doubt they'll just say the 4channers will have planned this out years in advance or something. It reminds one of a JFK truther going to heaven, being told by God Himself that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and concluding that the conspiracy runs deeper.
Good point, I didn't realize that the proportion of "Twitter eggs"* would be a factor of evidence.
*GamerGate-era term for new and anonymous Twitter accounts--back then, I think the default avatar for new accounts was an egg.
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The theory goes that normal people will see this extreme behavior and "peak", i.e. change their opinion on the trans movement, and trans people in general. It's an optimistic theory for sure; I can't claim anything on how it will all play out one way or the other.
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It seems like most of his problems stem from the comments. He may as well just disable them for good. The vast majority of readers do not comment (I think it's something like 1% of readers will comment), usually the most loyal or committed. There are still userhandles from 2014 commenting on Marginal Revolution. I sometimes skim the comments on his blog (you must pay to comment), and the vast majority of the comments seem pretty civil and in agreement, so I am not sure what he is seeing that I am not. Compared to reddit, he gets way less shit than most people (I took lots of shit from that article I shard a while back about TED Talks). Given how long he has been online and writing for the public, I figured he would have a thick skin.
The trans issue is not even that controversial. If he really wants to annoy his readers, push for higher marginal tax rates on upper middle class and above, which used to be the mainstay democratic position. That is way more contentious. And it affects him. This is why wokeness and trans issues is the opposite of skin in the game. None of these people are going to be affected by it, hence moving away from economics issues to identity ones.
As one of Freddie's subscribers and occasional commenters, prior to his "talking about trans people in the comments of one of my posts about an unrelated subject = instant ban" policy, it really was common for at least one comment thread on all of his posts to end up centering on trans issues, no matter how unrelated the post's subject matter. It was annoying.
I believe that this community experimented with a ban on the HBD topic for a while for similar reasons, and I don't think it was because the mods were anti-HBD per se, they were just tired of it being the only goddamn thing we talked about. That's my memory, anyway.
About the least charitable take I have on Freddie's banning commenting on about trans issues is that he may realize just how badly the social justice left has shot itself in the foot in the last five years with the trans issue, and is tired of having people using it as a generic gotcha attack on social justice politics in general.
I do get that if any and every post ends up being diverted by people in the comments going "So what about this latest trans outrage?" even if it is totally unconnected to the subject of the post, that is bad, and he's perfectly entitled to ban, shut down, and tell them to shut the hell up for doing that. And there are bad actors out there.
But a blanket "this is the official line and I don't listen to anything else" comes across as being censorship, you know, like the bad right-wingers who can't cope with diversity of opinion or anything that challenges their fixed notions of How Things Ought To Be engage in?
Freddie saying "I am fed-up of people dragging in trans issues where it's not pertinent, knock it off or eat a ban" is perfectly fair and his right as the Substack owner. Freddie saying "I'm not discussing this at all because any criticism is only bad-faith right-wingers who are all prejudiced bigots" isn't great. But then again, if he has a trans family member, sure, this is natural human behaviour.
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Your soul.
I've recently heard James Lindsey embrace a position that I've held for a long time now: transgenderism as an ideology is a gnostic cult. The material world is the work of an evil creator that has to be transcended to become one's true self.
Biology, culture, these are all the means to the end of what is most essentially a metaphysical argument about the very nature of the world and of oneself. This totally explains the paradox of gender abolitionists who nonetheless make a gazillion different genders: if you listen to them what they are looking for is communion with their true essence.
It is an argument about the nature of the world, I guess, but it's happening on the other side of the is/ought divide.
Gnostics drew their dividing line between the two: observable reality was on one side, moral authority on the other. The gnosis itself was a way to bring that authority across the line. There's no equivalent for transgender, because the trans line is drawn entirely within the "is" side. Is sex separable from gender? Are gender roles tied to objective reality? Any moral oughts are outsourced to the usual classical liberal principles.
Consider the concept of "validity." As used by the trans community, it's an assertion that one's internal experiences are real. That they are as real as the external presentation which traditionally signifies gender. There is no gnosis to be internalized; it is a materialist divide.
I also don't think the gender abolitionists are on board with xenopronouns or, often enough, transitioning. My impression has been that mentioning gender abolition in modern extremely-online communities will get you labeled a TERF. If true, there's no paradox to explain.
I disagree. What is self-id if not gnosis? I have the authority to decide what my true essence is and am therefore above the laws of society in dictating my role within it.
I fully maintain that the flipflops of sex/gender and nature/nurture are meaningless rhetorical artifice. That are ditched or swapped based on pure utility.
You'd think so, but reading their litterature, xenopronouns are actually a specifically abolitionist concept in trying to destroy or dilute the binary into absurdity. A escape into creativity if you will. All those endless videos of conservatives mocking the absurdity of them are missing the point. It's meant to be absurd in some sense. Of course the autists that maintain the wikis might just be so much into it that they actually believe in they/them astrology, but xenogenders are at at core a tactic. A political tactic.
If anything I think the people who talk most about gender abolition that I've seen are some of the most radically trans you can find. It is true that if you try to use this as an excuse to rebuke the necessity of medical transition they will pounce, and there is some latent hostility between the woman-in-jeans with a fancy title FTMs and the hardcore medical transhumanist MTFs for obvious reasons, but overall I've seen honest discussion of gender abolition among the left wing of transgenderists to be relatively unanimous on the goal being positive, and very staunch disagreement on how to get there, in a way quite similar to full communism.
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It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".
Yes I've also long held that "reality has a liberal bias" and "Gött mitt uns" are phrases with essentially identical meaning.
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It's weird. Gender seems obviously more tied to biology than race, which is, in large part (oc not fully) mediated by cultural association.
A black man is more like a white man than a black women. Yet the progressive thinks he is more capable to become the latter than the former because reasons.
A middle class African American is more like his middle class American white neighbor than he is like a rural African farmer. Not just culturally, possibly genetically too through racial mixing. Yet we are to believe that their dominant skin tone represent an impenetrable, immutable, objective racial feature of more import and gravity, than the separation between males and females.
Oh well, freddy has always seemed like a joke to me. I even think his 'education' takes are quite lacking. It's just that the right leaners here are already don't apply any critical eye to those takes because they're too busy clapping.
Isn't the idea that gender is more biological than race an argument in favor of transgender being acceptable and transracial not being acceptable? Biology can be altered by taking hormones that have a variety of physiological and psychological effects. Get a dark spray tan and dreadlocks doesn't have the same sort of effect on the transitioning person's physiology and psychology.
That's something of a 'trans-medicalist' perspective, most trans activists wouldn't endorse the idea that you have to take HRT to be legitimately trans. I think that's mostly for 'big tent' solidarity reasons, most trans people won't shut up about how much hormone therapy changed them.
This stance is generally labelled "truscum" by the trans activist community. No prizes for guessing how positively it was received.
I'm aware. I think there's a coherent idea of transness right there for the taking, but the actual trans community has strong strategic reasons not to take it. If they admit that transness is 'gatekeepable' in any way they won't be the ones who get to decide who is legitimately trans and who isn't. Hence, they have adopted a 'no gatekeeping' stance which is obviously incoherent but that doesn't mean that there is no coherent account of transness.
It'd be like if the Ukrainians declared anyone who fought on their side in the war a Ukrainian. Obviously it's logically incoherent to put some American guy who died in his first month in Ukraine in the same category as someone who lived there all their life, but you understand the strategic rhetoric and it doesn't mean there's no coherent account of Ukranian identity.
I don't think the people who don't really want to change anything about their bodies or lives except wear dresses and have female pronouns belong in the same category as people who have crippling genital dysphoria, but I understand the strategic logic of them all coming together under the same label.
Fair enough, that's a consistent position.
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it may be an argument, but it doesn't appear to be freddy's.
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I think if "I'm pregnant, using the ova produced by my own ovaries and carrying the foetus to term in my own uterus when I will then deliver it via my own vagina, but I am 100% a man and it's not legal for you to say otherwise" applies, then it damn well ought to apply in the case of "So what if my melanin levels don't match that person's levels?"
Why should testosterone be considered any different to taking antioxidants and vitamins to naturally increase production of melanin?
Or even tanning? If Chris (new name) needs an artificial source of testosterone to be a real man and this is acceptable, why should it be unacceptable for Shaniqua (new name) to use tanning booths and fake tan to be a real biracial woman? Depending on her ethnic background, it might be possible for Shaniqua to naturally achieve darker skin, while Chris will never be able to naturally generate testosterone. So which is more truly affecting physiology?
If you put a transgender person alone on a space station and give them HRT they're still going to have experiences aligned with their gender identity. How they experience emotions, sexual arousal, and some of their personality characteristics are going to become more closely aligned with the gender they identify with. On the obvious stereotypical stuff, trans women will find it much easier to cry, trans men experience more arousal in response to visual stimulus.
If you put a white person on a space station and let them increase their melanin levels are they going to have any experiences that constitute 'the black experience' or are part of black culture in the U.S? I would think not, because those experiences are inherently social. Perhaps they might have to change their skin care routine, but that doesn't seem a comparably large change in internal subjective experience.
That is to say that melanin is constitutive of race almost entirely because it's a flag that indicates how others should treat you socially. Gender is both a social cultural experience and an internal psychological one.
It makes sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to the gender I identify with than my birth sex, so I would like to occupy the social position of my gender identity and take hormones so my internal experiences and body align more fully with that gender". It doesn't make sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to a different race" because I don't think races have unique internal psychological experiences outside of social treatment.
As you point out with the case of pregnancy there are going to be all sorts of things where trans people have experiences that are wildly atypical for someone of the gender they identify with. Obviously criminalization of speech is bad and I oppose that. But if someone says to me: "I think my internal psychological experience is closest to a man's and I would like to occupy the male social position and take testosterone, but the only way for me to have biological children is to become pregnant and so I have chosen to do that please refer to me as a man" I would do so.
But this ultimately does not make sense. It's a claim to knowledge that the person cannot possibly posses. There is not way to differentiate between in the internal experience of "I am a male who correctly identifies that I internal psychological experience closer to what women have" and "I am a male who incorrectly believes I have internal psychological experience closer to what women have and actually the experience itself is inherently a male experience". We all only have one first person experience.
You could say the same for all internal mental states because language is an imperfect medium for communicating lived experience. How can I ever know if I'm really "angry", or if I am incorrectly describing some other emotion as anger? I can never directly access everyone else's experiences to know what anger truly is, I just have to construct an idea of anger based on other people's descriptions.
Very little usually hangs on the accuracy of such comparison. Yes - you can't actually know if the anger you feel is the same as the anger I feel although you do at least have a lot more evidence it does(especially if we're the same sex), because anger serves a common biological purpose. Your gender's body has very little reason to be able to accurately model such a thing and probably a few reasons to not perfectly do so.
And hell, I'm open minded, I'm not bothered by Men who want to dress as women, act like women, even get cosmetic surgery/take hormones to look like women for whatever reason. They just enjoy looking cute, they feel sexy, whatever. But don't expect me to agree that there is some cosmic way that they're actually fundamentally women. I gave up religion a long while ago and this is precisely the thing I will no longer accept on faith.
We're social animals so there's lots of evolutionary utility from being able to predict other people's actions and accurately modeling other people's internal states would be helpful for that.
Sure I'm not big on metaphysics. I think labels are about communicating useful information not cosmic essences. But I think in most cases the useful information to communicate is the social role a person is presently occupying not their birth sex. I think trans inclusive language in medical contexts is pretty dumb because the anatomical details are relevant there, but in most social contexts expected presentation and mannerism are the relevant content of the gendered label.
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One man's modus tollens or however that's phrased.
The trans activists would have us believe that a trans woman's inner experiences are similar to those of the modal female, but that it's ridiculous to suggest that a white person could have inner experiences similar to those of a black person.
A trans woman can approximate the social experience of being a female adult by dressing as one, and doing so could give her a meaningful insight into how being a woman "feels" socially. The thing is, there are real differences in bodily functions such that there are experiences a trans person will never be able to have: a trans woman will never experience menstruation or pregnancy, a trans man will never experience ejaculation. As you correctly note, the meaningful differences between a black person's subjective inner experiences and a white person's are almost entirely social: people treat you differently because of how you look. As in the case of transgender people, transracial people can approximate this social experience using tanning beds, makeup and the like.
So a trans person claims to be able to bridge the experiential gap and understand what it feels like to be someone of the opposite sex, overcoming the social differences (people treat you differently because you are female/male) AND the actual biological differences, which cannot even be approximated and which are hence entirely inscrutable. Transracial people have a much easier job: they only need to contend with the social differences. The imaginative empathetic gap is far narrower for transracial people than for transgender people.
I don't think you're getting it. The idea isn't that black and white people have no inner experiences in common, the idea is that they have no difference in inner experience except for in response to social treatment. To say "I desire to change my melanin to match my inner experience of blackness" is incoherent because there is no inner experience of blackness distinct from social treatment. To say "I desire to increase my testosterone to match my inner experience of masculinity" is coherent because femininity and masculinity are aspects of inner experiences.
I think a big part of our disagreement is that I think living with a testosterone or estrogen dominated body is a much bigger part of gendered experience than having the appropriate genitals. I ejaculate every few days, a cis woman menstruates a few days a month. We're both constantly having our emotional processing, cognition, personality and preferences shaped by our hormones. A trans man might never have 100% of the experiences of a cis man but getting on testosterone can give them a lot of them pretty quickly.
A white person who tans their skin isn't going to immediately start having racialized experiences, and because race is so linked to class and culture they may never. Progressives don't like to talk about this but black people police blackness all the time and discuss people not really being black enough. I don't think a well educated middle class woman who tans her skin so she's plausibly biracial is really going to experience much racial discrimination and may or may not participate in black culture.
It also seems a little telling that trans-racial people as re usually not white people from 'the ghetto' who live in the black community and want their skin to better reflect their internal experiences. It seems to be a bunch of white women who want favoritism for non-profit positions.
I don't know if every transgender person claims to have inner experiences similar to those of the opposite sex, but "I feel happier and more fulfilled when I'm presenting as a woman because I like the way people treat me" strikes me as the kind of sentiment many trans women would say accurately describes their inner lives. If a big motivation for transitioning (or even just "passing") is the social component, why is this desire legitimate in the case of transgender people but illegitimate in the case of transracial people? Why is "I like the way people treat me when I present as a woman, even though I'm male" a perfectly legitimate desire to hold, but "I like the way people treat me when I present as black, even though I'm white" offensive and wrongheaded?
All of this is further complicated by the fact that, while taking hormones and undergoing surgery will change a trans person's inner experiences to be more similar to those of a member of the opposite sex, many trans people never take hormones or undergo surgery, and the suggestion that trans people who don't medically transition aren't really trans is widely seen as an offensive form of gatekeeping in trans activist circles ("truscum" is the preferred term). For many trans people, the extent of their transition is social: they have no interest in changing their bodies in order to change their inner qualia, changing the way people treat them is good though for them. Once again, I ask why this preference is legitimate in the case of gender, but illegitimate in the case of race.
You could say the exact same thing about male sex offenders who suddenly "discover" an internally felt female gender identity upon conviction. If the existence of a few transracial grifters cynically claiming to be a different race for personal gain invalidates transracial as an identity, precisely the same argument applies to transgender. For what it's worth, Freddie himself doesn't go this far, acknowledging that he thinks there's something "tragic and wounded" about Rachel Dolezal.
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If people have to take hormones, or mutilate themselves to achieve their “gender identity” then those are biological changes that prove that the whole thing is biological.
But do keep up. The ideology of gender identity supports self identification and demands no medical intervention, which means that -for instance - any male rapist can be get into the female prison estate by merely calling himself a woman. No GRC even needed.
This is the inevitable result of gender identity - you have to believe anybody and everybody.
You don't though. It's possible to admit the existence of a mental health condition without believing everyone who self diagnoses with that condition actually has it. That's how gender dysphoria has been treated for most of history and the shift to mere identification being adequate is recent. Imo it isn't a logical conclusion of ideology, but an obviously incoherent position invented to deny any grounds for gatekeeping by the medical establishment.
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So if he thinks race is more biological he should be defending transracialism and dismissing transgenderism, no?
Yeah we're making different arguments. He seems to be focused on the issue of deception, with the idea that trans racial people are trying to deceive others about their biology while trans gender people acknowledge their biology is different by affixing trans as an adjective. It's a weird argument that's pretty orthogonal to what's actually contested.
And even if it were that simple, claiming to be experiencing gender dysphoria when you aren't (i.e. malingering) so that you can be transferred to a women's prison is another kind of deceit which seems highly relevant to the conversation.
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Is a cock closer to a bull than to a hen? Because cocks and bulls are similar in the same way that black men and white men are similar: they share a sex.
Either you are deliberately exaggerating for rhetorical effect, which is not the sort of low-effort sneering we want here, or you are literally claiming that white men and black men are not only difference species, but completely different classes of being, which is an extraordinary claim requiring proportional evidence.
Do not post like this. You have a number of warnings for just plain bad posts now. Your last one was almost a month ago, or I'd probably give you a ban as I usually do for a string of crappy comments in a short time. But next time will very likely be a ban.
I don't accept your false dichotomy just any more than I accept the (unsupported, extraordinary, consensus-building) claim I took exception to. There is no either/or, and I'm not sneering, unlike the responses I've gotten thus far. I noticed neither of them warranted a mod-hat brandishing a banhammer, despite being better examples of rule breaking.
My post is a reductio ad absurdum, which I know you are familiar with. I didn't appreciate @motteburner123 or @FCfromSSC deliberately ignoring that, but they're not threatening me with a ban for using simple logic. Both of them swallowed the absurd at face value in order to call me racist, and my post terrible, which each breaks more rules than the post they replied to (Antagonism, Charity, Consensus, Clarity, specifically "we ask that responders address what was literally said, on the assumption that this was at least part of the intention."). Motteburner didn't even use capitalization, having spent even less effort than my admittedly brief reply.
My post was short, but it was perfectly clear. The argument
is absurd. I demonstrated how absurd it was by taking it to the extreme. This is not sneering, it's rhetoric. I didn't think I needed three paragraphs of text when a simple and straightforward reductio ad absurdum would do the job. My use of a common form of argument was deliberately misconstrued, by you included, in a way that breaks the very rules you're threatening me with. In your own post you clearly understand how absurd it is. You link to classes, but if you followed the logic one step forward, you'd have realized that classes are determined by distance from a common ancestor. Why can't you apply that same logic to the comment I replied to, or even to my own comment which was obviously absurd?
The organisms most like you are not those that share your sex. That is absurd, like saying a cock is more like a bull than a hen. Instead, the organisms most like you are those that share the greatest share of ancestry. The organisms most like you are your parents and your siblings and your offspring. A black man is more like his black mother and black sisters than he is like a white man. He is more like his black grandmother and black cousins than he is a white man. The very same thing that determines classes, shared ancestors of common origin, is what makes the original claim obviously wrong and in need of the proactive evidence in favor. My rebuttal needs no such proactive evidence, as you tacitly admitted by using the very same logic when you ignored my argument.
There was exactly one thing in my post that was genuinely obscure and unstated. I used cock and bull, not stag and ram, for effect. I apologize for not speaking clearly in that regard.
I think if you’re making an “ad absurdium” argument the onus is on you the poster to clearly communicate that with at least one phrase.
Single phrase responses that read like rhetorical smack downs is precisely the kind of thing this site tries to avoid… like literally the whole point of the rules in my perception is to avoid one-liners submerging real content and thought out arguments.
The fact that most people consider your comment racist is an orthogonal issue and not, IMO, ban-related, though the mods can speak for themselves.
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Neither of them broke the rules. You did.
That's not how reductio ad absurdums work.
The two are not mutually exclusive. You do not get to throw sneers and then claim "I was using rhetoric."
I find your disclaimers unconvincing. The warning stands; do not do this again.
They both assumed the worst of me, despite rules for charity. They both called me names, despite rules for kindness. One didn't use capitalization, and referred to me as "u," despite rules for effort. How is that not breaking the rules?
Yes, it is. You are wrong.
You replied far too quickly to have read my post, so I don't know why I expect you to read this, but here's the definition:
This is exactly what I did. I followed the implication that black men and white men are more like each other than to any woman to its logical conclusion, thus disproving the proposition.
You seem to have it out for me, but that doesn't mean you can simply lie about what I'm doing, or flatly deny my arguments out of hand.
Seriously, you want me to mod someone for a lack of capitalization?
I read your post. It doesn't take that long to write a few lines in response.
I don't even notice you except when you pop up in the mod queue.
I don't care how you feel about being modded; I am telling you why you were modded, and what the consequences will be if you post like this again.
You should just ban him -- I don't see how any good can come of this.
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I want you to mod someone for low-effort swipes. The lack of capitalization is evidence for how low effort it was.
I want you to mod someone for saying this:
about me, which breaks the rules. I ignored it because I don't care, but if you're going to mod-hat me, you ought to be doing the same to him.
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no, they share sex and they are the same species. what are you talking about? the distance between races is comparable to the distance between mammals and birds? damn u racist.
Species are a social construct.
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cocks and bulls are separate species. Black men and White men are not separate species. Racial variation is not speciation in any meaningful sense. This comment is terrible.
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