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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.
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.
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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