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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.
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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