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I agree with everything you're saying and only get confused when you get to:
which is culturally and personally subjective value laden language-
and
which sounds accurate, cool and based. Yes I just agree with this, and disagree with the values that seem to be getting laid onto it.
I do think the conversation has lost itself. The ultimate progression of the philosophy of morphological freedom, does not stop at trans people. It shouldn't even really start with gender. But the saturation of gender into society, the fact that it is one of the things we have made matter, has turned it into the central issue. Furthermore, the push to normalize the artistic (read, self expressive) flesh-crafting of the body has become combative. Too combative. Both in the sense that its created push-back and in the sense that it's been pushing an ideological conformity.
Still, I always feel a bit exasperated by these conversations. People are arguing whether people should be allowed to grow tits, and I'm still here in the year 3000 rolling my eyes and waiting for the public to take universal morphological freedom seriously as an ideal so I can become a velociraptor.
You're doing the thing again. I get it. You don't think their preferences should be respected. You think their identities are less legitimate than other forms of self identification.
And you don't want people to be forced to respect them, or be forced to do other things they don't want to.
That last line at least I emphasize with.
But as long as people need to eat to live and need respect to get the help of society to live fulfilling lives, people are going to keep finding ways to socially pressure one another to cooperate in building an amenable environment for them personally, nyaa.
I too, would appreciate a less coercive society. But that's not the world we live in. You can't actually live as a cat if everyone around you constantly mocks you for acting like a cat, nyaa.
But I get the impression that the crux of our disagreement here, is at the root of your value judgement, you are set on the idea that people shouldn't be respected for 'acting like a cat', nyaa. You want to be able to keep producing social pressure that reduces the number of people nyaa-ing in your vicinity.
It seems to me that some measure of culture war is inevitable here. Both sides poisoning the environment's ability to support the ideas they find harmful to their personal hopes and dreams.
No forms of self identification are legitimate. Zero. None at all.
If someone argues that they're a genius, but has a below-average IQ, little to no reasoning ability, and frequently makes obvious mistakes, we don't validate their self-perception of their intellectual abilities. We reject it.
Someone can profess to belong to a subculture, and other members of that subculture can call them a poser with whatever reasoning they wish, and not include them. Wearing a band shirt without knowing any of their songs, for example. Their identity as a Beatles fan does not trump the fact that they can't name a single song. The rest of the subculture rejects it.
No identity is solely the discretion of the individual; every single one needs to be validated by others. Even trans people understand this on some level, because they are constantly trying to cajole, solicit and force validation from others, from pronoun use all the way up to sexual acts.
It's like a nickname. You can't give yourself a nickname, it has to be bestowed upon you. To try to do so is considered the height of cringe. Similarly, you can't declare yourself cool, or attractive, or any number of other things -- only other people can grant you that status.
This is a mindset that creates misery. You cannot be dependent on what other people think about you.
You are, regardless of whether you acknowledge it or not. You can reckon with it, or everyone can mock you behind your back if you have a wildly inaccurate self-perception and a confidence you don't deserve. There is no opting out, I'm afraid.
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This is a bit of a frame shift.
If I perceive myself as a guy who built the tallest possible building in minecraft (given the current height limit), other people aren't necessary to that particular identification. It's just a fact.
If I say I am a Beatles fan, I might not actually be a Beatles fan, but I am definitely someone who says they are a Beatles fan.
If I want to be a lizard, then I want to be a lizard.
Validation doesn't always mean I need other people to think I'm a lizard. Plenty of validation is on the level of needing other people to accept that I want to be a lizard and not then be cruel about it.
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What are other forms of self identification?
I mean other identities.
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Fair enough.
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This is incorrect. I absolutely respect their preferences, which is why I'm not in favor of, say delegalizing sex reassignment surgeries. They're the ones not respecting other people's preferences, since they want to impose their worldview on others.
You said they expect others to pander to their self-justified illusions.
calling them self-justified illusions is value-loaded language. When you use that language it communicates the message that their identities aren't real, that you don't think a cat-identifying person should be allowed to expect others to treat them the way they want to be treated.
I do think the culture war has become overly totaling in this regard. Not everyone should have to respect everyone.
But it's reasonable to expect those who want to be close to you to respect you. And it's reasonable to want and fight for a society that respects you enough to not disadvantage you in the competition of capitalism.
No it isn't. I want to be treated like an aristocratic nobleman (a core part of my identity is believing in my own inherent superiority over others), living a life of artistic patronage and luxury while others serve me. Do you think it is reasonable for me to "want and fight for a society that respects you enough to not disadvantage you in the competition of capitalism" in this context?
That's reasonable in the sense that I can empathize with you fighting for your dream.
But by 'not disadvantage you in the competition of capitalism' I mean something along the lines of engendering an equitable meritocracy with a central focus on interest groups you are part of.
Engendering an equitable meritocracy is the thing I think most people will find reasonable and empathize with on priors, given our world, and your scenario is its explicit inverse in a way I think most people will not find reasonable.
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There is a strain of thought that focuses on the arbitrariness of socially constructed things that has never sat right with me as if all illusions are created equally. Let's imagine two people whose self-illusion is that of a Star Trek fan, one of them has seen every episode and movie, they know the plots of every episode, and can quote sections of the script by heart. The other Star Trek fan is confusing Star Trek with Star Wars. The feeling of being a 'Star Trek Fan' is a personal illusion, that as far as I can tell would fall into the same category of illusions as the feeling of being a 'woman' as you are using the term. Yet I feel very comfortable saying that one of those two Star Trek fans is 'wrong' in their personal self-illusion. To add a tiny bit of meat to my hypothetical, if I had to pick one of the two people to get a free pass for a hand-shaking event with Jeri Ryan, I would pick the 'real' Star Trek fan.
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That was someone else.
I agree with that, and I believe that does not imply I'm disrespecting their preferences. Your right to believe you're a cat ends at my right to not be forced to say "heeereee kitty, kitty, kitty!" when I see you. This applies to all other identities. Muslims don't have to recognize me as a Muslim, the Japanase don't have to recognize me as a Japanaese, etc.
Ah, yes my bad.
This is a bit too abstract to address. We definitely do put social and legal expectations on one another that compel us to do or not do things all the time. And sometimes we hit one another with serious consequences for these things.
Perhaps we could focus it a bit.
I thought it was pretty focused? You gave the example of someone identifying as a cat. I added examples of someone identifying as a Muslim or Japanese without being accepted as one by these groups. If you don't like these comparison feel free to give another one, but I'd like that to be accompanied by an argument why the new analogy is better than the ones we already had.
Mmm, I kept rewriting my post because I was having trouble relating it back to trans situations, which are really what all our metaphors are presumably about.
There are lots of object level issues there that play into the social expectations.
I can argue that there are cases where you will be socially punished for not accepting someone as a Muslim or Japanese.
But what I'm really thinking here, is that the analogy isn't useful at all.
Social expectations do exist for all sorts of things, and the expectations and their punishments are very diverse.
Sometimes the punishments come from your local friend group, sometimes they come from formal repercussions.
But whether those expectations and punishments are warranted in the specific case of say, not using someone's pronouns, is really only answerable if we talk about pronouns.
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I think that proves too much. If society shames you for not saying hello or being polite, or calling a married woman Mrs or a Dr, Dr, they are forcing preferences upon you. There isn't any intrinsic reason this should stop any particular place. Society forces its preferences on you all the time, individuals can choose to buck the trend and then take the social consequences but most people will go along.
My right to believe I am a cat ends where I am able to persuade society it ends. Your right not to comply then ends where you don't want to take the social consequences. That's what the whole thing is about! (And of course vice versa, if you can persuade society I am not a cat then if I choose to continue acting as one, I will take the social consequences in return).
If you were able to persuade enough Japanese people to recognize you as Japanese such that they could successfully shame other Japanese people who did not, then at a societal level you ARE Japanese. You could go into Japanese only bars and so on.
It is at once a meaningful biological group and a malleable social group and it is possible to be in one or the other, both or neither.
Yes, and I'm in the process of persuading society that there should be no consequences for this particular thing, Do you mind?
Would you like to participate in the conversation, or continue making the unrelated observation about the arbitrariness of social conventions?
Well if you admit that is exactly what you are trying to do, it isn't unrelated is it?
Remember we are here to discuss the culture war not wage it. If you are trying to persuade society here 1) This is not the venue for that. 2) You'd be better off somewhere with significant "normie" presence.
Its absolutely fine to use arguments as soldiers, but at the very least here you should be upfront about that.
Hence my meta commentary.
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Not a problem. I frequently load my language with my own values, as a way of communicating those values to others.
Correct. Their identities are not real.
Correct. They should have no such expectation.
Am I correct that you're a new name in this comment thread? Sometimes I lose track.
But yes. I fully expect people to load their language like this. I was somewhat confused for a moment when I believed the person I was responding to lacked self-awareness on the matter. In any case, the confusion was sorted out.
I think there is quite the conversation to be had on the nature of identity. Certainly it is not true to say "I am of the species Felis catus" but if I say "I am a sapient being who goes 'nyaa', and wears cat ears, and likes pets and scratches." then that is not an illusion. That's objectively correct, nyaa. I might even shorthand that to "I am a catboy."
Unless we want to go deeper, and speak of all identity as an illusion. Or we could have a whole conversation on what constitutes the cultural legitimacy of an identity.
Either way it seems overly simplistic to just say "Their identities are not real" and leave it there. There's just so much to say about identity.
Why not? I certainly expect it from all of my confidants and peers.
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To be fair, the conversation is more "should parents get to veto their kids growing tits the same way they get to veto a tattoo?" and "should people be forced to consider a guy who grew tits to be the same thing as a woman". The temperature for this culture war issue would drop significantly, if it was limited to simple body modification, rather than imposing one's values on others.
There are a lot of trans sub-issues I think have gone too far, at least for the philosophical conversation about body modification I'm trying to sort out in my head. But what we have here is really the heart of my conundrum.
As soon as you say "People shouldn't just be legally allowed to change their bodies, they should be socially allowed to change their bodies." you are restricting people's ability to socially enforce their values.
I predict, if people were getting Stalking Cat-esque modifications by the hundred-thousands, there would be a hell of a culture war about that too.
Sure, but this problem is bigger than trans issues, or body modification. It's a question of how to balance individual vs. collective rights. You can apply to anything from body modification to your diet.
I don't think that's true. Look at furries, people have strong opinions on them, but there isn't really a culture war around them. In my opinion it's precisely because they aren't trying to impose their values on others.
It's actually teetering on the verge of being a serious frontier on the culture war. After one or two furries made some noise about joining a trans counterprotest to Scotland radfems, culture war sites started going after uninvolved but gross furries in the vicinity. Graham Linehan is in on the fun, as are other commentators in a similar milieu. Fox News has taken note of a Boston College professor who teaches a furry-focused course.
Will it erupt into something more? Eh, I'm not counting on it, but we'll see. It definitely shows signs of real potential as a culture war front, though.
I've never really grokked the level of commitment to furryness that exists. Is it like MLP fandom, a strange group of probably disproportionately autistic people who find community in something that isn't taken all that serious by most members, where if the culture war really got hot around it people would probably just drop the practice and pick a different thing to build a community around? or is it more like gay/trans/religion/emacs(intentionally large range) where it will be fought to the bitter end?
I suspect it's more like the latter. I've never particularly liked the community, and I'm far from alone in that among people who are fond of anthro animals, but etiology-wise I suspect it's much more like being gay/trans than most of any of those groups want to credit. Culture wars heating up only encourages identity--nothing like a bit of Persecution to build a determined culture (for better or worse).
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Depends who'd be doing the attacking. If it was the blue tribe, it would probably dwindle in size like you said. If it was the red tribe, you'd probably actually start seeing litter boxes in public schools (oh wait, that's otherkin, not furries, but hopefully you get what I mean).
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Furries don't go to work in fur-suits. They don't openly express themselves as furries 24 hours per day.
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The trans movement not about morphological freedom, it is about self-assigned identity trumping morphology. It is not dangerous because it is asking for men to be able to lop their dicks off, or even because it is insisting that men who lop their dicks off thereby become women. It is dangerous because it insists that some men are already women even if they don't lop their dicks off.
The trans movement has been about lots of things.
I see that your main concern wrt it is:
I imagine you refer to the many pragmatic concerns regarding how we handle the segregation of men and women as the concepts break down.
The short of it is that I just agree that those are complicated and difficult and have to be hashed out on a practical level.
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