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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34450 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I agree with everything you're saying and only get confused when you get to:

mutilate themselves

which is culturally and personally subjective value laden language-

and

Transpeople are creating chimeras and forcing others to respect that.

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.

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:

it insists that some men are already women

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.

Still, I always feel a bit exasperated by these conversations. People are arguing whether people should be allowed to grow tits

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

there isn't really a culture war around them.

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).

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).

Furries don't go to work in fur-suits. They don't openly express themselves as furries 24 hours per day.

Most of the culture war over transgenderism hinges upon the definition of "women".

This always struck me as a kind of map/territory confusion. The culture war hinges upon whether trans women should be referred to with feminine pronouns and be allowed in women exclusive spaces. Does anyone in this debate really care about anything else? It's like when people argue about the dictionary definition of "racism". Getting to a "true" definition is impossible and pointless because in this case words are just a proxy for the real issues.

People on the both sides, while intelligent, hold stupid beliefs about this subject. This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex. Sex is either "male" or "female" (and I'm excluding intersex for simplicity of argument) and is immutable from birth. Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

People have sexes, languages have genders. Anything more complicating than that is unprovable hibby jibby. This idea of gender as "socially created psychological programming" is the result of a modern propaganda campaign.

I disagree - I think that there is actually something there when they point at their concept of gender. There absolutely are cultural expectations and social constructions with regard to gender, and there are definitely areas where those concepts change. There are real, observable and definite differences between what it means to be a good man in feudal Japan and what it means to be a good man in 1950s America.

I think that the left is wrong when they think you can actually divorce these concepts and ideas from sex in any real way, but their error isn't in identifying that part of what we view as gender is socially constructed (i.e. wearing skirts is feminine today, but a kilt is the height of masculinity on a highland warrior).

Everything is socially constructed, but society is biologically constructed.

The way we understand medicine is socially constructed but nobody uses 'actually cancer is a social construct' as a gotcha, or in order to get some kind of cancer-benefits in absence of medical evidence of cancer.

There absolutely are cultural expectations and social constructions with regard to gender, and there are definitely areas where those concepts change

Sure, but so what? What does this matter in any way with regards to calling a girl a girl or a boy a boy?

With regards to calling a girl a girl? Nothing, I explicitly said that the left is wrong they think that these concepts can be divorced from sex. They're right when they point out that a lot of our expectations regarding gender are created and reinforced culturally, and if you try to attack them on those grounds you are going to lose because they are right - that's not where the error is occurring. The problem arises when they expand the category of gender to include things that are really in the domain of sex, but that doesn't mean there isn't any use in being able to say that something is masculine due to an inherent property of human masculinity that transcends culture(sex) as opposed to something more local(gender).

I just don't think anyone really ever has used gender to mean, "what girls generally act like around here" or any definition similar to that. There are the people who used it as a synonym for sex, people who used it in reference to language, and now people who use it in an arguments as soldiers context.

People have been using it like that for decades in academia, and there is actually a use for the term. I am not suggesting that the term should be used uncritically at all - and I think that you can ultimately make a stronger "transphobic" argument by adopting and using those concepts.

People have been using it like that for decades in academia

Yes and? I am fairly certain it was invented in that context for the purpose of arguments as soldiers. And I dont really see the argument for a stronger argument. The argument is certain people have a delusion. Tomboy is perfectly good word as is Nancy. Other more powerful and specific ones include autogynephilia fetishist, delusional dysphoric, etc.

Yes and? I am fairly certain it was invented in that context for the purpose of arguments as soldiers.

And it worked. If your opponent has a strategy that is working and can convince reasonable bystanders, even if that strategy is just playing shellgames with definitions, then countering or side-stepping it is a good idea. By clearly laying out the distinction beforehand, you prevent them from using it as an escape-hatch later on in the discussion. Just calling a trans person a delusional fetishist might win you votes with the hard right, but it isn't a strategy that's terribly effective if you're trying to convince regular people who aren't extremely online/invested in the culture war.

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I think even if we taboo the word "gender" we still have the following distinct things from sex:

  • Sex roles: The roles a particular culture assigns to the sexes, including cultural fictions like hijra or kathoey, or artificially created categories like eunuch, trans, etc.

  • Sexual proprioception / Internal sense of sex or sex role: The bodily and psycho-social feeling of having a sexed body or belonging to a particular sex role in society.

I don't think any of these require "unprovable hibby jibby." Sex roles are obviously separate from sex itself, since there's nothing inherently "female" about dresses, or "male" about suit jackets.

And the existence of people with a sexual proprioception of different genitals or secondary sexual characteristics would hardly be mystical. If Scott's recent posts are anything to go on, there are people around the world in different cultures who are convinced the witches are stealing their penises, so it's not insane to believe that "sometimes brains do funny things, and people feel like they have different body parts than they physically have." They might be a minority of modern day trans people, but I don't think it's a crazy implausible claim to make that such people might exist. That would also of course be separate from how we deal with them on a societal level.

Similarly, the idea of having an internal sense of sex or sex role isn't crazy to me, even if it isn't a fundamental part of human psychology. I'm sure that the King of England feels like the King of England, even though there's no way he evolved a mental faculty to specifically feel like the King of England. Is it so crazy that there might be a female-bodied human that has an internal sense that they should occupy the male sex role? Insofar as the male sex role is separate from being male, why should we deny entry into that category?

At the core, I really can't accept the attempt to both reject the 'gender binary' whilst still defining all gender expression in terms of 'masculine' and 'feminine' identities. Indeed, claiming that gender is a 'spectrum' still implies ONLY TWO ENDPOINTS.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/spectrum

Quoth:

spectrum noun

a range of different positions, opinions, etc. between two extreme points:

To me, there has to be an acknowledgement of the underlying biological reality. We don't have to give it moral weight, we don't have to believe it can't be changed, we don't have to use it to judge people as groups (lol). I grasp that the naturalistic fallacy applies here.

BUT.

If you were born with a uterus, ovaries, and thus produced the chemical known as estrogen in abundance, the physical development of your body, including your brain, is going to follow a predictable path.

If you are capable of bearing children, capable of producing milk to feed infants, and have a natural tendency towards socializing with other humans...

This is going to lead to a VERY different social role for you in a state of nature. And removing you from the 'state of nature' won't revert the biological factors.

Likewise, if you you have greater upper body strength and bone density due to having testes that produce testosterone, and a generally more physically aggressive nature... that ALSO implies a different social role.

And turns out that the definitions of 'masculine,' 'male,' and 'man' were forged over centuries of these social roles being acknowledged, as with 'feminine,' 'female,' and 'woman.'

So I don't see ANY way you can completely divorce the concept of masculinity and femininity from the biological differences that come from being a sexually dimorphic species.

At the very least, I think the people trying to turn those terms into floating signifiers whose meanings exist only in the minds of the individual have utterly failed to meet the burden of showing that these concepts are no longer useful or accurate and that a change is necessary.

They'd have a better case if they were trying to completely do away with the concepts and introduce whatever New Soviet (Wo)Man identity they want to apply to everyone which ignores individual differences altogether, methinks.

Most of the culture war over transgenderism hinges upon the definition of "women".

I would put it a different way. Because the history of feminism has been to erode men's only spaces (see female sports reporters fighting to be let into men's locker rooms, the erosion of old boys clubs, etc.), there are basically no men's spaces left to fight over with any cultural cache or legitimacy.

Virtually no man feels physically unsafe if a trans man is using the same restroom as him, and there otherwise aren't any widespread "men's safe spaces" in society for trans men to invade.

The reason people are fighting over "what is a woman?" is two-fold: 1) women's safe spaces and women's spaces in general actually exist in society, and 2) the reason they exist is because there are physical size and strength differences between men and women that matter in a number of circumstances. Figuring out how to deal with biological males who want to enter women's safe spaces, or other women's spaces is a genuine conflict between two opposing sets of rights (or claims to harm or risk) that must be resolved to somebody's dissatisfaction.

What I suspect happens with those people who identify as "trans" is that somehow (either indirectly via hormonal changes or via social proof and feelings of not belonging) they start to "feel" like, say, a woman despite being a male.

I don't think being trans is any one thing. I'm one of the more vocally pro-trans people on the Motte, but even I'll admit that the breakdown of trans and non-binary people today probably includes a small minority of non-culture bound trans people who would be trans no matter what society they lived in, and a large number of people who are only "trans" or "non-binary" because of the social environment they grew up in.

My main point of departure is being socially liberal enough that I think adults should be able to make risky medical decisions about their own bodies, and that in the face of ambiguous or bad evidence for childhood transition it's still probably better to let a combination of parents, kid and doctor decide how they want to deal with a child who wants to live as the opposite sex. Trans maximalists might call even my fairly liberal position "transphobic", but I view it as a fairly middle of the road position to say, "I think people should generally have enough freedom to make even bad decisions that might make their lives worse."

I used to work in a genetics lab that spent a good amount of time identifying sex markers in species and determineing if samples were male or female. The field in the database that got an M or an F was gender.

I think there's a category error underlying a lot of the discussion on this. I don't think it's right to think of sex and gender as being two distinct (though correlated) categories, where everyone has a sex, and everyone also has a gender, and we can place you into a little 2x2 box of what you are (non-binary, or whatever, aside). Rather, sex is some primitive physical category, and gender is the social result of your sex.

Put another way:

Sex is the physical category.

Gender is the set of assumptions, expectations, rules, and roles that society places on you as a result of your sex. It is socially constructed not in the tautological sense that "gender" (like "sex") is a categorization that people made up, but in the meaningful sense of "gender" being a set of material things that society does to you.

Notice, and let me emphasize:

  • Gender is not a category, it's a bunch of things that happen to you because of your category. Language often elides gender as the category, but everyone is really talking about sex.

  • Gender is a real thing in the material world. We in 2023 America expect that males (sex) will do man (gender) things like wear pants, get called "he", and pee in the restroom that other males do. It's not some metaphysical voodoo.

  • Gender being socially constructed doesn't imply that it can be changed from the individual's perspective. This is again a category error. It's not a category, it's a bunch of ways that society treats you.

  • A lot of components of gender probably make sense given sex differences, e.g., males are bigger and more aggressive, and gender roles need to clamp down on that; females are the sex class that gives birth and nurses children, and gender roles need to make that possible. On the other hand, there are likely many components of gender that make less sense given sex differences, either because they never did, or times have changed.

From this perspective it seems like the way forward is the so-called gender critical view, where we ask whether various components of gender are really appropriate social reactions to your sex category. Like, "girls can be good at math too!" and "boys can wear dresses!"

On the trans activist side, it the sex-gender is different argument is kind of a red herring. You don't get to choose your gender, not because gender and sex are the same thing, but because gender is what society does to you because of your sex. We can slowly change how society treats members differently by sex class, but you, an individual, don't get to control that. Also, by the way, it seems sort of obvious that the overall trajectory of their rhetorical move here is (1) say "fine, you can't change your sex but at least you can change your gender," and soon enough (2) "actually you can change your sex too." This leaves me thinking that they don't really believe sex-gender distinction that they emphasize.

Likewise people on the cultural right seem to think that separating sex and gender is merely a sneaky way to legitimize how trans identified males self-identify. I sort of think that's true, but at least analytically I think the distinction outlined above is useful. A lot of the more basic right wing discussion of this seems to blend together two issues: "can men become women" (no) and "do the gendered expectations we put on people because of their sex make sense?" (maybe, maybe not). Separating them is useful.

To the community, we probably shouldn't feed the trolls. I suspect this person is a troll due to statements like this further down thread:

Gender was a shared delusion that people of my era (the year here is 2871) have freed themselves from long ago.

That and a general vague sense of belligerence, and argumentativeness.

I know I replied further down, and I probably shouldn't have. I suspected this person was a troll and fed the troll anyway. Live and learn.

The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex. ...Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

I could compromise on that, were it not that the movement now seems to have moved on and changed its mind yet again about this, so now we have trans people talking about their gender and meaning the exact same thing as sex. Now they are female-gender, which is the same thing as being female-sex, and if you raise any queries you are a transphobe and TERF.

I'm tired of the entire conversation, and we haven't even reached a workable consensus yet. I do find my attitudes hardening: there are only two sexes, male and female. Intersex is a different, real thing and you don't get to invoke it to cover your notion of "well uh I'm obviously female but apart from cutting my hair and wearing baggy jumpers I make no difference, but I do identify as non-binary and get VERY UPSET if you refer to me as 'she/her'".

The way that DEI is now, seemingly, DEIB - "B" for "belonging", because "inclusion" was not inclusive enough, it seems. This is the kind of thing that pisses people off: just when you think that at last there is something that everyone finally agrees on, the most progressive of the fringe go off and change it all and the entire argument gets reset back to the beginning all over again.

The way that DEI is now, seemingly, DEIB - "B" for "belonging", because "inclusion" was not inclusive enough, it seems. This is the kind of thing that pisses people off: just when you think that at last there is something that everyone finally agrees on, the most progressive of the fringe go off and change it all and the entire argument gets reset back to the beginning all over again.

Oh, I see you are not educated enough yet. The term belonging means one has to take vigorous action to support the DEI initiative. Inclusion means no microaggressions, you just make sure you do not alienate protected groups and their DEI shepherds from HR. Now belonging goes one step further, it is implemented once the organization is committed enough. Belonging requires action from your side to be actively welcoming and supporting DEI initiatives. So belonging means that you put on BLM t-shirt or participate in black month event or that you rat on your colleague who was not inclusive enough because he committed microaggression today. You see, all people who clapped after Stalin's speech were expressing their mutual belonging, therefore one who does not clap, or he who does not clap loud enough or long enough can be even viewed as not being inclusive. It's kind of genius, isn't it?

The way that DEI is now, seemingly, DEIB - "B" for "belonging", because "inclusion" was not inclusive enough, it seems

I have qualms about the term of "belonging" to an organization: they don't own me, and never will. I realize it can also refer to more affirmative group membership, but it's such an obviously two-faced word choice that I have trouble taking it seriously.

Nah, it's probably just to stop people from being able to call them "DIE".

Now it's DIEB. German for Thief.

This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex. The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.

If you can assert it one way, I can assert it the other. "No it isn't, sex and gender are synonyms".

Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.

This is not a coherent thing even if one were to agree with your previous framing. If it's tribe-specific, then there is no such thing as "the female gender"; your gender would have to be "American female", "Burkina Fasoan female", "East Timorese female". Very little unifies those cultures (perhaps it was literally zero pre-globalisation), so by this account, we'd need +7,000 genders, to account for all roles in all cultures? At which point, your concept is so far away from the dictionary that you should probably start using a new word instead of trying to repurpose the "gender" one.

Is that so strange? It's like objecting that we can't refer to a single "leadership category" that holds true for all cultures. Like, yes there's a lot of similarities between a President, a King, an Emperor, a Pope, etc. But they are all different categories, and if we're being extra scrupulous you'll probably end up deciding that "American President" is a different category from "North Korean President" in spite of their similar names in English.

Certainly, I think it would be sensible enough to say that race is similar. Different cultures across space and time have had radically different conceptions of race, whether it was the Greeks and their concepts of Hellenes vs. Barbarians, or the highly detailed admixture charts of the colonial Spanish, or the census categories in modern America, it would be silly to criticize the concept of race because "American black" is a different category from "British black."

Why is it so crazy to say that the social category of "American female" is quite different from the social category of "Ancient Roman aristocratic female" which is different from "Ancient Roman female slave"? That just seems obviously true, and not at all weird. Certainly it's not evidence that we went wrong somewhere in our definitions or categorizations. Humans just have made up that many different kinds of social categories, even if they might share broad similarities that we could group together to create fewer categories that are easier to reason about and make broad conclusions about.

Why is it so crazy to say that the social category of "American female" is quite different from the social category of "Ancient Roman aristocratic female" which is different from "Ancient Roman female slave"?

It's not crazy, but it's not relevant to the real world. We don't exclude people from bathrooms or decide what prison to send them to based on the difference between an American female and an Ancient Roman aristocratic female. Your categorization is useless for the things that people care about.

Your categorization is useless for the things that people care about.

I feel like that example is only useless because Ancient Rome doesn't exist anymore. It's very relevant to American women who might travel to the Middle East how females are treated in those societies. The bigger problem is that, since most people never get the opportunity to travel, they never get the chance to see how people are categorically treated in different cultures. It's information they can only gather second hand.

Debated this before here. The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.

I have no idea what they are talking about but in their social environment it’s extremely past being seperate meanings.

Honestly don’t think this ever gets settled unless transgenders disappears. Which seems like the most likely path. Transsexuals seem like a fad to me. Someday we will look back at this debate like beanie babies when the young people get a new current thing. A lot of us will always look at you stupid if you claim gender and sex are different.

The people who really grew up in the blue tribe have accepted gender is not sex.

Oh no, that was just the first stage in the gender war. Progressives have moved on from "biological sex and gender identity are separate" (which at least allowed a definition of transgender as "someone whose gender identity differs from their biological sex") to "gender identity is biological sex".

As an example, take this Slate article from almost 7 years ago: What Is a “Male Body”?, which contains statements like:

[When] a transgender woman uses a women’s restroom there are still zero men — biological or otherwise — in that restroom.

Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?

Then she continues with this:

Some people assigned female at birth have more testosterone than others; some people are born with XXY or XO chromosomes instead of XX or XY chromosomes.

This is true, but all of those people are still medically classifiable as male or female. Women with high testosterone are still women: they have a female reproductive system (ovaries, uterus, vagina), and not a male reproductive system (prostate, penis, testes). People born with XXY-chromosomes are said to suffer from Klinefelter's syndrome, which is understood to affect exclusively males.

Conspicuously the author never claimed that they are affected by any of these genetic or chromosomal aberrations. Yet they go on to conclude:

I was assigned female at birth, but I have never had a female body.

Which again raises the question: in what way was their body not female? If they have XX-chromosomes, ovaries, uterus and a vagina, no SRY gene, no penis, no testes, no prostate, what divides them from the biological women who have the same physical characteristics?

So in short, no: progressives have not accepted that gender is not sex. Many now insist that gender is sex, but that sex has nothing to do with genetics or body parts. It's all in the mind. This is obviously ridiculous to any rational person, but here we are.

Which obviously raises the question: what does it mean to be a transgender woman if the transgender woman is also biologically a woman? How does she differ from non-trans biological women and is there a word to describe that difference, if it's not "biological sex"?

One way they may explain it is that saying "transgender woman" is a similar to let's say saying "tall woman". Of course it does not remove the problem of definition of the word woman. Which as far as I understand is then defined metaphysically, woman is somebody who "feels like a woman born in wrong body". So womanhood is metaphysical term, it is something like a soul.

I can speak to my experience of this. I remember back in the mid 2000s I was starting college at what is one of the most obnoxiously progressive institutions on the planet. It was end of freshman year. I remember talking with someone who said that gender and sex were different and gender was a social construct. She just like dropped it into a conversation so casually, so matter of factly, such that I, who tries to be a blank slate, just accepted it, assumed she knows something I don't or whatever.

And there were hundreds more conversations just like that that happened throughout my college career. I basically started believing it and buying into it myself to some degree. All these people, all the reasonable and smart people i knew, couldn't be wrong about something they're so sure about, right? It wasn't until 4 years after college, that I saw "gender and sex are different" had started to be weaponized into justifications I disagreed regarding the how society needs treat trans people. I then realized, "Wait, why did I buy into this in the first place? What value or evidence is there that gender and sex are different? Is there any logical consistency to this?" such that I ended up rejecting the notion of gender and sex being different altogether.

Ya agree.

My dog always wants to sit in a human seat when we eat. And he will be quiet and pretend he’s part of the conversation and mimics our behavior like he’s a human. He’s still a dog.

Also got my first don’t be evil reddit notification. Felt proud of it. I’ve definitely hardened in my belief from wtf are these people talking about to actively opposing Tran life.

What value or evidence is there that gender and sex are different?

This is the moment of enlightenment with the gender/sex distinction, I think: when you realise that there was never a good evidence basis for this distinction, and it was developed for political rather than explanatory purposes.

I think there is a misunderstanding here.

Sex and Gender are not two completely seperate entities, they are highly correlated. 97% of the time you can think of gender as "the way someone performs their biological sex". That is of course dependent on where and when they were socialized, their self-conception, their peergroup, their class and many other things. A woman in Iran today will perform the role "woman" differently than a woman in russia in the 19th century would have. If you try to think of this variance as discrete genders then yes you would need some ridiculous amount, which is why it is more practical to think of it as a spectrum or, even better, through the lens of clustering. Likewise a man might have different ideas about what it means to "be a man" or to "be manly" throughout his life and adjust his behaviour accordingly. I wouldn't think of that as him switching genders. He's moving around in genderspace if you will, but it's not like a switch gets flipped at a discrete point.

I'm honestly not sure what exactly is going on with transgender people but I suspect in the cases of "genuine" gender dysphoria there is some underlying physiological cause (hormone levels in the womb is one candidate) that causes someone to be born with a brain that behaves like a brain in a different-sex body would. Thus those people default to the opposite end of the gender spectrum and then start deviating from there.

The big difference between sex and gender is that while sex isn't a perfect binary (nothing in biology is) it forms a tight cluster. A very large percentage of people with XY Chromosomes have a penis, produce sperm, grow a beard and so on. Likewise a very large percentage of people that produce viable sperm have a penis etc. etc. Yes there are outliers but it is disingenuous to say that biological sex can't be thought of as binary(with a small asterisk). The same isn't true for gender. The probability that a person with a penis that was raised in the US enjoys one or more of {Beer, Sportsball, Guns, Jeans, (Arm-)Wrestling, Programming, Protecting others, Soldering,...} is high and is much higher than for someone with a vagina. However the correlation there is not nearly as strong as the XY Chromosomes/Penis or Penis/Beard correlations. Gender is much more fluid, more easily changed and obviously more dependent on external factors. There are still two relatively distinct clusters that capture most people but the variance is much higher.

Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.

Biology defines males and females as having small (sperm) and large (egg) sex cells.

True hermaphroditism is extremely rare and non functional:

Spermatogenesis has only been observed in solitary testes and not in the testicular portions of ovotestes

The chromosomes XY, XX etc generally kick off development to phenotypically adult human sexes but there are rare disorders which most people are familiar with now.

The chromosomal pairs for sexes are different in different species, eg in birds males are the sex with 2 identical sex chroms.

But birds and mammals both fit the large/small sex cell binary

Yeah I deleted that maybe a minute after posting, because I didn't want to explain thee edge cases

RNA != DNA

Still happens (and can cause cancer or mutations in future generations) but in DNA the rates are something like a handful per few billion.

Then they have to make it through repair and error detecting mechanisms.

Not as good as computers (you can move gigabyte files across the internet no problem) but far more accurate than almost anything graspable by humans

Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.

An analogy I made previously is that this is like Byzantine theologians trying to make a distinction between the "nature" and "essence" of Christ to let him be simultaneously human and divine. To buy into their framing that there's a real distinction here (rather than just something pseudointellectual they made up to keep themselves in a job) is to already concede the debate.

I would contend that the correct answer when a Monophysite tries to draw you into a debate on homoousios is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Jesus was just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of God". Likewise, I would contend that the correct answer when a trans theorist tries to draw you into a debate on gender is to tell him "That's a bullshit concept, you're making words up for distinctions that don't exist due to ideological motivation, Emerald Treespirit is just Some Wierd Guy acting wierd, not a male performing the gender role of a woman".

Of course you can use sex and gender as synonyms but that leaves you with a weaker model that is unable to explain much of the variance that you see in how people act vs how they differ biologically.

It doesn't leave you with a weaker model, it leaves you with a better model, because "man acting wierd" correctly predicts what happens when you put them in female prison, whereas "performing the social role of a woman" does not. The POOR predictivity of your model recently cost the Scottish premier her job.

It doesn’t hinge on definitions, it hinges on the utility of language versus power dynamics.

When liberals think of definitions, they think about what a specialized academic body has defined. This is, in fact, not actually a definition. This is a “term of art” or jargon which can (at most) act as a lesser definition. A legal definition of argument is different than the real world definition of argument. The legal definers do not get to force their definition upon the normal, everyday majority usage. So it is with all terms of art.

Per a survey 20 years ago, the majority of people believe the word is rooted in male/female division. Only 10% bring up social roles or “socially defined”. A self-perception origin of the word only accounted for 19% of origin beliefs, but because only 42% of definitions supplied a statement on origin, this is more like 8%.

Now, the power dynamic today may be that the academics do get to foist their “social construct” definition on the word gender. For a time, there will exist a purgatory of definitions where the previous majority definers are tricked into believing that this is the real definition. But what will happen is that most people will discount the importance of “gender” as a word. It would be as if someone created a new word, “spashiboo”, which refers to a social construction — the majority will simply not care about “spashiboo” and go back to caring about the male/female sex distinction.

But why is the male/female sex distinction so important and resilient to attempts at obfuscation? And here is where the significance lies: words are used for their utility. There is hardly a definition in social affairs more important than the male/female division, because it dictates our sexual aims (and thus our evolutionary and biological aims, and our social aims), and it efficiently categorized the psychological differences between men and women.

This is more important than anything that the ivory tower gender wizards can brew in their textbooks. Normal people care about having sex and procreating, and they also want to divide humans according to useful social categories. The first reason mandates the priority of a male/female definition. The second reason encourages a male/female definition, because men and women act differently, and I have seen no evidence than MTF are more womanly in their psychological orientation (in fact I have seen evidence to the opposite: excelling in video games, typical male autism, masculine faces, etc).

The link to your pdf document doesn't work for me.

It is “Definitions of gender and sex: The subtleties of meaning”

https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007123617636

Now, the power dynamic today may be that the academics do get to foist their “social construct” definition on the word gender. For a time, there will exist a purgatory of definitions where the previous majority definers are tricked into believing that this is the real definition. But what will happen is that most people will discount the importance of “gender” as a word. It would be as if someone created a new word, “spashiboo”, which refers to a social construction — the majority will simply not care about “spashiboo” and go back to caring about the male/female sex distinction.

I wonder if this is a partial explanation for the use of "females" among some types of young men.

There's just no real better term to apply to female kind as a whole. Girls has a connotation of youth and immaturity, women has an inference of age that excludes the younger cohort.

There's just no real better term to apply to female kind as a whole.

But it's probably only caught on because it sounds better if you say it while sneering.

"Males" is a common construct supported by the social justice movement, usually in the phrase "white males". It's unsurprising that some people would not recognize that the social justice movement is engaged in double standards where "males" is acceptable but "females" isn't.

Those men don't seem to be taking many ques from the social justice movement. If anything, it's the exact opposite, something like "I'm talking about people born with pussies, not whatever the fuck you wierdos are on about."

This false belief is that gender is not distinct from sex.

Gender is a polite word for sex, and was overwhelmingly used as such for the vast majority of the existence of the language. What gender-theorists use the word to refer to is, to put it mildly, less than concrete.

I have no idea what feeling like a woman means. I have no idea what feeling like a man means, either, despite being one! I simply have nothing to compare against. I understand bright in comparison to dark, happy in comparison to sad, but I have nothing to compare any gender feelings I may or may not have against, so I know no way to define them because they are all I know. And I simply don't see how anyone else does, either.

The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex. Sex is either "male" or "female" (and I'm excluding intersex for simplicity of argument) and is immutable from birth. Gender on the other hand refers to a socially created psychological programming that every tribe and society imbues its members on upon.

Can you cite evidence for why this particular framing should be the way we define these words? As I've said before on this forum, the thing that most people refer to these days as gender may more traditionally (as in prior to 2012, for most of society) be referred to as "gender roles", and I think that there would be a lot less controversy (and the statements would carry less weight) if people said that gender roles are socially constructed or distinct from sex, etc.

Also as I've said before, the debate about the definition of the word "gender" is kind of weird. Like Scott once said:

I can’t argue with this. No, literally, I can’t argue with this. There’s no disputing the definitions of words. If you say that “racism” is a rare species of nocturnal bird native to New Guinea which feeds upon morning dew and the dreams of young children, then all I can do is point out that the dictionary and common usage both disagree with you.

I'm keen on pointing out that it always seemed to me comparable to a situation in which one day half of society started using the word "tallness" differently. Some people may tell me that I have to treat them as if they're 6'4". And if I point out that they're actually 5'8", they say, "that's my height. It's completely distinct from my tallness, which everyone knows is just socially constructed roles and is determined entirely by how people self-identify".

It's just a definition. But the problem is that that definition carries implications based on the previous usage of the word. It seems as if gender advocates coopted the word "gender" and applied the definitions of "gender roles" to it, using the weight the term "gender" carries towards specific ends in the form of social activism.

I don’t think in anyway they are referring to gender roles. A stay at home dad is still 100% male even if he’s performing traditionally female roles. And that dude who stole suitcases runs i believe some health department for the Feds isn’t claiming to be a man because he has an executive role but is claiming to be a female because ???? Wants attention from the best I can tell.

Sorry, maybe I muddled the conversation, and shouldn't have mentioned gender roles here. I just brought it up because I often see people say "gender is a social construct. The proof is because what it means to be a women in China is different than here, women in China dress differently, etc". I just mean to say that I reject that sort of argument, because it's talking about gender roles, not gender. Gender roles are different in China. Not gender itself.

Gender roles are different in China.

Is that even true? Do women in China not take more interest in children and babies? Are they more authoritative and aggressive than men? In what way are gender roles different in China beyond superficial elements like clothing? Is a woman in a red dress expressing a different gender role than a woman in a yellow dress?

IDK, it's probably true to some degree, though I'm no expert. Some places have tribes where they track lineage through the women. Many places have variances on how demure women are and how subservient they are to men, and variances on the specific notions of what is a woman/man's obligation to society.

My experience in a country not unlike China (I assume) is that the women here are much more feminine, in all the ways you can suggest other than that they are not particularly demure (or chaste!) The men are not particularly masculine though (not trying to put them down), but I hear they do pretty well.

I would contest that gender roles are socially constructed. Sure, society has an influence but so does biology. There are feedback loops at work.

The fact is that gender is indeed totally distinct from sex.

You assert that which must be proven.

This is not a fact, this is an assertion.

And it's a pretty silly one at that. Gender is totally distinct? What does that even mean? Does it have any relation to sex? What is that relation? You can't define "gender" without reference to sex, and if you could it would stop meaning what the trans lobby wants it to mean.

If gender is a "feeling", as you claim, then that is the same thing as saying it does not exist.

This is a mod note on all of your posts in this thread, not just this one:

You are presenting an interesting argument in an interesting way: that's good.

You're being condescending, antagonistic, and posting a lot of responses that pattern-match to "troll": that's bad.

A lot of people have reported you for trolling. I am not sure whether you're just having a go at "rationalists" to see how worked up you can get them about gender, or if you are making a serious attempt to challenge "gender theory," but if your intention is to prompt a debate about whether gender is real, please stop presenting your arguments in the tone of a fictional time traveler from the far future who's already figured out that everyone who disagrees with him is an ignoramus. In other words, strive for good faith engagement. Right now, what you are posting does not look very much like good faith.

Something I’ve noticed about gender trolls is that they feel like they can “gotcha” reality by redefining words.

Has anyone here ever heard of the “sovereign citizen” movement? A culture war adjacent recent happening was the trial of a mass murderer named “Darrel Brooks”. Darrell is, and also was, an adherent to this movement.

His belief was essentially that he could use some clever wording to get himself out of trouble for having obviously, on multiple videos, killed a bunch of people at a parade in Waukesha Wisconsin. Despite being obviously guilty of this crime, Darrel spent weeks wasting time arguing with the judge about him, the person in the courtroom, not being Darrel Brooks, but being a “third party intervenor”, as if this would catch the judge in a linguistic gotcha that would prove that the obvious objective reality that the court exists in wasnt actually so real after all.

You can see some of what I’m talking about here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jm-E3FNUIvs

What’s interesting about that these sovcits is that they aren’t stupid, the arguments they make have some internal consistency; it’s just that they think that if they torture the words enough, that they can warp reality.

I think the gender trolls are suffering from a similar sort of delusion. No matter how much somebody might torture the meaning of words, and no matter how complex and seemingly sophisticated these linguistic arguments might become (they do seem to get ever more complex over time), they will never change the reality that women are in fact women, and men are in fact men, and that there is a very very tiny minority of people who suffer from a genetic defect which causes them to be neither. You cannot make a linguistic argument that alters reality because the language is only a tool which describes reality.

Saying “well actually sex and gender are different! So this whole time when you’ve been using the worded gender to describe something, you didn’t realize but you were actually an adherent to my ideology!” Is just…silly. No, my mother saying “gender” because she does like saying “sex” in front of people, does not change what she meant, which was a description of a reality where men and women both exist.

What’s interesting about that these sovcits is that they aren’t stupid, the arguments they make have some internal consistency; it’s just that they think that if they torture the words enough, that they can warp reality.

No, their arguments have no internal consistency, yes they are stupid.

'The government is illegitimate band of gangsters with no authority other than guns, taxes are extortion and armed robbery, but there is one clever trick how to avoid them! If you spell your name in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, they have to leave you alone! Do not ask why, they just have to!"

It is not any kind of brave protest or noble resistance, it is nothing than plain delusion.

Rational Wiki is in their case 100% right.

Sovereign citizens would accurately be described as the flat earthers of the legal world.

For that matter the idea that Gender is not a direct synonym for sex is contested at best. If you just look at the way people debate the gender issue, you can confirm that this is the case.

You might consider a superposition of two states:

In one, gender and sex mean the same thing. Therefore, trans people are both the sex and gender they were born as, can change neither. It follows that they should be legally/practically treated as that sex.

In the other, sex is biological, gender is a social/mental construct. Therefore, trans people are the sex they were born as, but can be whatever gender they want, even totally made up ones. It follows that gender is practically meaningless, there's little reason to ever bring it up or care about it, and all legal/practical behaviors should ignore gender and only use sex as an input.

In either case, the behavioral prognosis is the same: treat people according to their biological sex, at least for the small number of instances where there is legitimate cause to segregate based on sex, such as sports or prisons. It's only by conflating the two via Motte and Bailey shenanigans that trans activists can construct arguments to justify the changing of sex.

Of course this was the genius of “What is a Woman.” The basic problem with transgenderism is that it equivocates. On one hand, it says woman is based purely on self identification. On the other hand, it requires a platonic ideal of what a woman is (how do you identify with X without being able to categorize what X is outside of self ID). Clearly that platonic form is based on sex. And that transsexual people don’t actually meet this platonic form and therefore are clearly something different.

I was reading a terrible thing about Irish Catholicism recently. In the 1930s, there was a rise in extreme belief, parallel to the hysteria about the Eucharistic Congress - which is a gathering of believers in the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. The general hysteria about the conference, possibly the biggest even since independence, influenced even Protestants, particularly the young, into a firmly held belief in transubstantiation. Probably this was an old version of social contagion.

A Protestant child at a Protestant school in Mayo asked his teacher if he believed in transubstantiation. The teacher, an evangelical protestant, said he didn’t. The school immediately fired him, but the teacher refused to leave, arguing that his had the right to his religious beliefs which should be accommodated, particularly given the religious nature of the school.

He was jailed numerous times by a judiciary sympathetic to Catholic theology, supposedly for breach of an injunction when he refused to not turn up for work. He wasn’t given any chance to plead his case, even though he argued that the case was a clear example of religious discrimination something the Irish constitution prohibits.

Even worse (and though people know about the Magdalene laundries this isn’t so well known) there was an increasing tendency at the time - something still seen in Islamic countries today - to castrate and bring up as female any post pubescent boy who exhibited homosexual tendencies, and to bring up as male any girl who exhibited lesbian tendencies. Sometimes the latter also involved irreversible medical treatments. Like a mastectomy.

What an ugly and irrational age, and we are lucky to be rid of it.

  • -29

What is the hysteria of the Eucharistic Congress? By extreme belief do you mean the belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, since that is Catholic doctrine, before and after 1930.

Is your post on the religious discrimination in a country where a conflated religion/ethnicity were politically disenfranchised for centuries?

On your second point do you have any sources on this not so well known Irish phenomenon?

For the Magdalene Laundries in regards to the Catholic Church I see it as similar to the case of the Canadian Indian schools. This more reflects the views of the wider society I don't think this can be pinned on Catholicism since a secular attempt at the 'problems' in the same milieu with the same resources would have likely reached a the same outcome. Other Catholic countries like Italy and Portugal didn't treat unwed mothers the same way. Society saw this 'problem' of unwed mothers or in Canada's case integrating native children into a settler society, and delegated it to the social workers of the day, underpaid religious communities of members often taking vows of poverty.

Yeah, and remember the bad times of the 1900s, when people were thrown in jail for ... their uncommon sexual preferences ... or not conforming to mainstream gender roles. And remember the satanic panic? When parents were obsessed with the - entirely fabricated - concept of anti-christian satanists grooming their children in schools? What an ugly and irrational age, and we are lucky to be rid of it.

... that's a bad post, as is yours. they're just not good analogies! forcing people to become the opposite gender or not be gay is very different from 'giving the option' to be trans. And people have been 'cancelled' for dissent for ... most of history. Progressives still respect free speech in a positive sense more than ancient christians did. You can't be exiled from the united states for saying anything! You can't be executed for pissing off people with power!

we are lucky to be rid of it.

We're rid of it?

I think that was sarcasm. The entire post appears to be drawing a sly comparison between the current progressive hegemony and irrational and tyrannical religious practices in the past, without explicitly drawing the connection.

Is this a reference to current events that are being referred to as 30’s Ireland for some reason?

Would you care to provide any evidence for your just-so story?

You wouldn't be referencing the Enoch Burke case, would you? And seeing how many people swallow the story about the Eucharistic Congress (true even that happened) without reading through to the end about castrating boys?

And then doing a gotcha about how they're willing to believe it about the bad old Catholic Church but they don't see the problem with the new orthodoxy around trans rights?

Because that would be naughty (and while I'm generally sympathetic to the view Burke holds about sex and gender, I also think he is bringing a lot of the trouble on his own head by his actions).

Who are you trying to fool with this bait and switch? Most people on here are already skeptical of trans ideology.

I suspect given the lack of identifying details for this case provided, nor any results showing up for an alleged 1930s incident in Mayo, that you made the whole thing up, and/or filed the serial numbers off a current court case involving trans people and changed the names, entities, location and context in an attempt to create "gotcha" bait.

and/or filed the serial numbers off a current court case involving trans people and changed the names, entities, location and context in an attempt to create "gotcha" bait

It sounds like a reference to the recently controversial Enoch Burke, a Protestant teacher whose objection to the use of 'they' pronouns for a student spiralled into him being suspended from his job on accusations of harassing the principle for an answer, his banning from the school grounds by a court while the suspension was being appealed, his jailing for 3 months for contempt of court when he repeatedly showed up at the school despite the ban, and lately his family members getting forcefully ejected from a court after he finally lost his appeal against the ban.

This one presumably:

https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-teacher-sacked-amidst-transgender-controversy-turns-up-at-school-for-third-day-246323

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/15/irish-teacher-jailed-contempt-of-court-after-refusing-student-pronouns

This post is terrible for the very obvious reason that you are not speaking plainly or in good faith, and that runs contrary to the ethos of this sub. People (including mods) do not want to have to parse an allegorical post to figure out what you're really talking about, which is why we have the rule requiring you to make your point reasonably clear and plain.

What an ugly and irrational age, and we are lucky to be rid of it.

Right, you're talking about trans ideology. Make your point reasonably clear and plain. If you want to compare one thing to another, that's fine, but state outright what comparison you are making and then be prepared to defend it.

This kind of obnoxious attempt to see how many gotchas you can score gets you a two-day ban, to discourage others from pulling this.

It seems like we have been getting a lot of low quality top level post lately

I normally jump on posts that start with "it seems," but...yeah. Yeah it does.

Fingers crossed that it's just a week or two and things settle down a bit.

IS MY CLASH WITH THEMOTTE POSTERS PURELY VALUE BASED

Let's assume that your poorly-developed, unsourced arguments are all 100% true. They're not, and throwing music and novels in there is almost absurd enough to suggest parody, but I don't want to deal with your Gish gallop, so I'm going to use my imagination.

Why should I care? If, as you seem to think, [redacted] are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing. From: @netstack

17 upvotes!

Now, the fascinating thing about this post is it takes my position far further than I could ever imagine doing so and then confronts me with a person who claims it would be irrelevant if this extreme position were fully true. That "unfeeling automata" might, if representing a substantial portion of your elite, convert your somewhat free country into a nightmare where you never saw an unmasked face again, seems not to bother him in the slightest.

Now I'd be tempted to ignore this as a one-off but then there's this response to my comment on foot-binding.

"...Furthermore, similar laundry lists of objectionable practices would be possible to assemble concerning any race of people or, indeed, of the human race. Even assuming the Chinese are every bit as bad as you say, that doesn't make them special.** Even assuming the [redacted] are every bit as bad as you say**, that doesn't make them special." - naraburns

Now this is fascinating to me, because while I can intuitively understand the conditions leading to things like genocide, or more to the point physical child abuse, footbinding falls within the entirely alien moral universe world to me. Given the choice between an otherwise loving family who bound my feet, and an otherwise violent one that didn't I cannot possibly imagine choosing the latter. I'm pretty sure this isn't just my gender speaking for another gender, and I'm more than willing to entertain what might be considered misogynistic thinking. Yet @DaseIndustries hits me with this.

"...Read some interviews of surviving women from traditional families who have had that done to them, see what they think of it."

Now, I don't doubt that someone of Dase's intellectual caliber understands why the testimony of a person, victimized irreperably by loved ones, in a cultural context where this was normal; might be less than reliable. So I'm left, once again with the feeling that our underlying basic instincts must just be different in some way. How would we go about figuring out whether this is the case?

  • -28

At the risk of making discussion even less substantive and more personal, I ask: are you, by any chance, like myself, a self-hating person of East Asian descent?

The only people I know who are as obsessed as you are with the particular deficiencies of the Chinese soul are myself and a small number of acquaintances, also of Chinese descent. Occasionally we will have conversations along the lines of "why do we just kind of suck?" We'll challenge our other friends to name a single courageous, empathetic, inspiring Chinese leader, and they'll come up with some names, and I'll say those are pretty weak examples, and they'll say, well how many courageous empathetic inspiring leaders of other races can you name? And I'll ask whether basic kindness is even a virtue in Chinese culture, which will elicit eyerolls. Etc.

While I am somewhat heartened by the testimonies of commenters here who insist that they have interacted with East Asians and found them all right, I remain, like you, hooked on this idea of a fundamental racial difference in disposition, even if I cannot put my finger on exactly what it is. And I'm sure I would be shot down just as you have been if I tried to make more specific claims. However, I'm less sure that this is important on a geopolitical or civilizational level. There's definitely some vibe mismatch, and sometimes vibes are superficial and sometimes not. Anyway, if you do not happen to be an undercover East Asian, I suppose I can only express my hope for general tolerance.

I will respond to you on one specific point:

3.2 MASKS PEOPLE, MASKS! Explain to me why, until perhaps the last two months, your average East-Asian American was more likely to be masked than blue-anon types. Isn't the parsimonious answer simply that infants who won't fight to uncover their nose, become adults that are indifferent to showing their face?

Speaking only for myself, I still wear a mask sometimes for several reasons: 1) it's cold out, and a mask keeps my face warm, 2) I seem to get sick easily, 3) when I have allergies I feel more free to sneeze/throat-clear on a crowded bus if I'm wearing a mask, 4) it seems to produce some feeling of psychological safety, as with sunglasses, 5) the lower half of my face isn't especially attractive, so I'm not losing too much, 6) it might deter unwanted chitchat when I'm in a hurry, a bit like headphones. (Reasons 4-6 are more just slight benefits that counterbalance the negatives.)

Is your circle of acquaintances familiar with Lee Kuan Yew? He’s easily among the best national leaders in the modern era.

At the risk of making discussion even less substantive and more personal, I ask: are you, by any chance, like myself, a self-hating person of East Asian descent?

No. Sorry, that would be an epic twist wouldn't it?

We'll challenge our other friends to name a single courageous, empathetic, inspiring Chinese leader...

This one is easy, Lee Kuan Yew on all counts.

Anyway, if you do not happen to be an undercover East Asian, I suppose I can only express my hope for general tolerance.

Any self hating Western oriented Chinese person, provided they are not self hating in the woke direction, gets westerner points from me. If it weren't for the mask I'd consider you an honorary Aryan, but nonetheless you can rest assured that I have no intention of doing you any harm. My concerns are about future immigration, and the rise of China the nation. As for all Asians currently in the US, I don't think they should ever suffer anything other than full legal and social equality.

If we're going to be casually racist and speak loosely,

I get what you're talking about, the slice of Chinese pop cultural output that I've seen seems more referential and less sophisticated than what I've seen elsewhere... from Japan. For Korea and Singapore, I think they may have industrialized too quickly, and for China Communism probably damaged the novel culture-generating power that China would have had, and put it below what they could have reached. It probably also damaged the population's behavior, as it seems to have done in Russia.

I still think this vibe would be there without the Communism and if industrialization had occurred more slowly, but there might be a greater perception of comfort and a greater willingness to lean back and experiment.

The success of the Europeans since the 1500s has been a bit psychologically destabilizing for everyone.

Asians are at least on a better footing here in that they're the only ones that can really challenge the Europeans on the footing where they're most impressive - large modern industrial nation-states with sophisticated warfighting systems.

But for others, it's been so upsetting that BENs and WS envision Europeans as some sort of unstoppable psychic warrior race, and I just don't think that's an accurate characterization. If we're being loosely racist, low epistemic standards - they're the galaxy brain race, the Willy Wonka of races, high variation in ideas, and they've been making everyone else put up with their wacky ideas for the last 5 centuries, and sometimes that's been very beneficial, and other times it's been very hazardous. Asians (China especially) may have come up with similar ideas 3 millennia ago, but didn't necessarily apply the same intensity or combine them with industry. (Like, I'm surprised that it's not an Alt-Right meme that "East Asians are the Control Group.")

If people stopped feeling threatened by Europeans for 10 minutes and thought "what are these guys actually like?" they would notice that Europeans are Wonka, notice a bit more of how their ethics distributing stack works (for instance, UMC-W attacks on WWC), relax a bit, and ask themselves how they can use this to build up national wealth. In like 100-200 years, the Europeans may be seen like a Tumblr sexyman.

And to the credit of governments throughout East and Southeast Asia, many of them have shunned the "Revenge of the Third World" model in favor of peacefully building up industrial capital through exports to the United States - even Vietnam, who the United States dumped millions of tons of bombs on in living memory.

(Edit: It should go without saying, but like 90% of "whiteness" theory or "white supremacy" theory content is just the unstoppable psychic warrior race hypothesis. One has to be a bit paranoid to think that "2+2=4" is somehow "white." A lot of this stuff sounds weird because it's superstition.)

BENs ; WS ; UMC-W ; WWC

?

You know what modernity really needs? A Strong Leader, one with determination as strong as steel, who'd make usage of unexplained acronyms punishable by death. Nay, we need 50 such leaders.

Other than that little homicidal nitpick, cool post (really).

This will be sort of speaking on the meta level on @Lepidus's comments, as I don't really have a response to this specific post. I've been in East Asia for a few months now (and not my first time visiting,) and I really love the people here. So kind, smart, organized, polite, I adore the aesthetics and so many aspects of the culture here. Being on public transit where people don't talk and just follow basic rules of etiquette is about three million times nicer than any ride on the bus or train in Europe let alone America. But I'm somewhat sympathetic to Lepidus's underlying point as well, though I don't think he's particularly good at rhetoric. What I'm specifically referring to is that I find the political and social structures of East Asia to be quite restrictive. I don't want to live under a regime that is treating me like I'm East Asian. I love visiting the area for the novelty and to experience something different from the West, but the lack of individual freedom here is hard to cope with as a relatively libertarian American person. There certainly are values that Chinese hold differently from the West and it isn't a waste of time to worry about that, given the geopolitical situation.

Agree that Lepidus's tone is combative and the posts are a bit incoherent but since no one seems to be taking his side I just thought I'd try to throw a bone out to maybe spark discussion in a different direction.

Yeah, but that's not really racial - you'd probably find medieval europe or rome significantly more restrictivre, and Chinese that come to America become as liberal as anyone else.

What specifically about east asian social/political structures did you find 'restrictive/lack of freedom/different values'? Like, specific experiences or things you saw, it's a better discussion-starter.

I've visited and worked a bit in China and Korea. They are nice to visit. The people are really nice to Western visitors. Korea is a beautiful country. China is dirty and polluted. I met my Chinese in-laws' children and young babies and they subjectively seemed as responsive and lively as white children. I don't know why that "Chinese babies are unresponsive" nonsense keeps coming up. It seemed wrong to my lying eyes.

I entirely agree that these countries are good to visit or work for a few weeks or months in, but I would not want to live there. Korean offices had way too much deference to managers coupled with way too much overwork and were completely thankless. Months of crunch time ending with only the top manager getting a large bonus and everyone else getting nothing. Like a reddit antiwork post but real.

Chinese work culture was actually better in terms of work life balance, but the pollution and general dirtiness is hard to take. And the sloppy half-assed attitude they have at work.

Meh - china is a big place. Pollution is a negative but not that bad honestly. I lived there for almost two decades tbk

Shanghai winter pollution was egregious. You blow your nose and it comes out with a grey-black tint. And out in the countryside they burned lots of grass and plants so it was really smokey. I cannot complain bitterly enough about the terrible air quality in winter in multiple Chinese cities.

But in summer the air was subjectively fine.

We don't need to figure anything out, it's clearly not just values because this post is bothersome to me on its face because it has very little context, is continuing an argument but also ignoring the argument to deflect disagreements as ad hoc or something, I'm not even sure because you're making vague insinuations here that I also can't parse even after realizing who you are and what it is you're talking about.

We don't live inside your brain and the way this was posted doesn't make that apparent. So, yes, clearly there are problems beyond just disagreeing with your values. But does this matter? Even understanding this post I'm left wondering what you're even trying to do here. Are you posting this because you want the answer? Because I'm sure you can strike a nerve and get more agitated responses than usual depending on the topic but there's clearly something more than that and it's not even the previous posts that made it clear but it's this post. Whatever drove you to make this post and to keep it so vague as if we all know about you and your arguments is probably partly the reason why people are reacting harsher than you think they should to you.

So, maybe think about why this post exists, why it needed to be made so long after those arguments have basically died, why you didn't link to any of the quotes or preface with what it is you were arguing about. And I know it's not fair because sometimes your personal overton window bugbear will bug other people immensely more than their's would you but if you want to get people to react less aggressive or dismissive toward you the first step is to be conscientious in general and avoid examples of how people phrase things as consensus building or culture warring, even if you disagree the examples you'd get from a search might just help you understand what to avoid when framing your position or just, in general, constructing something that someone else is going to read. Like I said before, we're not in your brain and we don't have your brain. But don't treat us like we're stupid even if we are.

As others say, this and your previous post seem to be lacking context. It looks like maybe you're worried about masking in the West? But it really didn't seem to be a bunch of East Asian officials forcing that on Westerners, but the Westerners' own leaders, of different ethnicities, largely European ancestry, and the people themselves.

There is a certain repetition of theme through some of these veiling and binding practices of various cultures, which is often tightly bound up with class and leisure. Well off people who can have food delivered and work from home mandating masks, dressing their daughters in burkas, binding their daughters' feet, loading them up with 20 lbs of neck rings, tight lacing their corsets. What's the big deal, surely you don't have to walk and work outside like peasants? Castrate your son and he'll never have to do any physical labor, he can just sing full time and be paid well for it. As others mentioned, this shows up sometimes in various times and places. Now that Western culture has become unusually permissive about (lack of) veiling, people's anxiety is coming out in things like anorexia, bulimia, cutting, dysphoria, and whatever else. Apparently humans get really neurotic and destructive when stressed about mate choice and social standing.

The best solution I've heard of is to have smaller social units that are explicitly told to be kind and understanding to each other like church communities, and have as many different small hierarchies as possible, so that everyone isn't competing for the same couple of attractive husbands/wives or the same slot at the Ivies or the same job at the New York Times or whatever, there are plenty of ways to succeed. My impression is that middle upper class Americans have been feeling the squeeze lately, writing stressed out articles about not being able to get into an elite university, wearing masks in public, and finding new and interesting gender expressions to enforce with zeal. Perhaps next year's fashion trend will be tight laced corsets.

I'm not saying that some ethnic groups don't do more stressed out status competitions than others, but calling it a foreign moral universe seems a bit much.

In simple language your arguments suck, they are low quality independent of the quality of the evidence you bring. Or even the conclusion you reached. Which is quite the feat to accomplish to be honest.

You confuse discrete and continous relationships, you propose correlating things that literally cant be correlated as in if you plugged in those two variables in a function in any programming language it would throw a syntax error, let alone it being semantically wrong. You create chains of logic that dont hold given that the nodes in that chain are not unique/independent, literally the opposite of what constructing an airtight argument is.

If you ironed out thise kinks you wouldnt have had such a bad response but most of your argument wouldnt have remained either.

Even most people who are willing to consider differences in racial IQ or 'character' between races disagreed with your post - because it's facially wrong from either personal experience with the chinese or familiarity with chinese history, or because it's poorly argued. A bunch of psychology studies from the mid 1900s doesn't help - the replication crisis began around 2010, and the 2010 papers are immeasurably better than those of 1960. And that leads to the dismissive responses.

Nevertheless, 'values' or personal beliefs clearly played a big role - a post with similar-quality evidence on, say, a recent news story about woke doing something bad wouldn't have been downvoted as much! And at least it isn't a compilation of chinese street accident where nobody helps webms.

Foot binding isn't really more barbaric than stuff human sacrifice, artificial cranial deformation, female genital mutilation, etc. Barbaric and backwards cultural practices are pretty universal across cultures.

the replication crisis began around 2010

To be pedantic, that's around the time that we started to become aware of the problem.

Your point is very good, though: any unreplicated psychology studies from the mid-1990s have minimal evidential value.

Quoth Betteridge:

No.

You are "clashing" with various motteposters because you aren't showing your work. Infant breathing studies could prove that Asian children react differently than American ones. Neat. This doesn't imply that they are extra-vulnerable to totalitarianism. Likewise, footbinding is bizarre and morally upsetting. That is insufficient to tar Asians as cruel or alien. Career statistics are not adequate to show a racial penalty to charisma. The fact that you can't name Asian musicians doesn't mean they don't exist, or that their society is creatively barren. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you consistently fail to deliver.

I think you have, in your head, assumed the conclusion. Then all that remains is to splatter enough vaguely-suggestive facts on the page that your readers come to agree. This is wrong.

When I said up your game, I did not mean come back from your ban and try doing the same thing from a different angle.

Starting a brand new thread just to call out and pick fights with people who argued with you last time does not in any way convince me that you are here to test your arguments per the Motte's guiding purpose. It convinces me you are here to fight and push agendas.

I am not fooled by your faux-rhetorical question as a title, or your final question at the end of this post, or your attempts at obfuscation.

Banned for a week, though my instinct is to just skip ahead to the inevitable permaban. Stop trying to play us for fools.

Adding to zinker and others –

I respond to your threads for two reasons. A) the purported innate racial temperamental difference is an interesting problem in the context of charging demographics and the geopolitical situation, as well as in general interesting for me. And b) I have a policy of trying to make lemonade out of lemons that life gives me.

But boy do you supply rotten ones. To the point that engaging further, recasting your disingenuous rhetorical questions as a worthwhile conversation starter, is a bit of a defection against the social compact of the place – because it would be rewarding a bad actor. So best I can do is add to the dogpile a bit of didactic material for lurkers.

Rather than saying niceties about my «intellectual caliber» while glibly dismissing the argument as obviously reliant on false consciousness of Chinese women, and therefore laughably inferior to your cruel-abuse-from-family-members angle, you could seriously grapple with the proposition and check out Bossen's work or something some collection of interviews with those women. I don't even care if it validates your general impression, that's fine – just stop acting as if you have done all object level homework you had to and now can loudly muse about first principles while reiterating the same few examples that you claim imply the threat of universal masking tyranny or whatever. If you think no testimony of Chinese victims themselves is admissible, that is fine too – but argue this explicitly.

Update substantively on mod calls. Mods hold dictatorial power, and aggravating them with unrepentant repeat offenses is utterly pointless. This is just a fact of life.

Respond to criticisms as if they are made in good faith, by reasonably intelligent and skeptical people who have thought about the issue. Even when you are sure they do not merit such a prior (believe me, I know how it feels) – try to reinforce your conjectures against their specific arguments. Report and move on, if you are exasperated with bad faith and low effort.

Crucially, do not treat your opponents like morons. We may pontificate and soapbox a lot, but it's not an excuse to condescend.

If you can't play by these rules, we can't help you.

For no particular reason, 'engaging with bossen's work'. Just from the article, it doesn't seem right - women doing stationary handwork, 'boring, sedentary tasks' like making fabric, is universal, so it's not clear their reluctance to do it is an issue, and foot binding is an extreme treatment for a questionable problem.

... apparently it's a 250 page book. Wasn't really interested in reading it, but ended up skimming it because the 'economic and ethnographic history of textile production' parts are pretty interesting, even though the strong claims about footbinding / textiles aren't really true. They exactingly prove that footbinding declined when mechanized textile was growing, but correlation, causation... Even if (very plausible) the decline of textile labor in favor of other more modern forms of less sedentary labor for women led to a decline in footbinding, this doesn't at all prove footbinding existed for the purpose of that labor. [what follows is more boring disagreement with bossen's claims)

From this book review,

At times, however, one suspects that too much effort has been spent on analysing the statistical data. Although the authors conducted 1,943 interviews with women, analysis of these qualitative materials is rare throughout the book. Historians who expect to read rural women’s life stories relating to footbinding would be disappointed.

I think they collected a bunch of data of the form 'foot binding went away as a practice when industrialization happened, foot binding traditionally happened around the same age women started producing cloth'. But the former could be explained by cultural flow from industrialized places, or industrialization generally upending old cultural practices, and the latter is probably just an uninteresting coincidence, as both happen when the person is young, and there aren't that many few-year-long age buckets during youth. They combine this with narratives about how foot binding is related to female textile work, and lots of detail about female textile work and footbinding, but no real evidence is given that the latter is even mostly a result of the former.

Again from the review

The negative proposition raised by the authors, that mothers bound their daughters’ feet because of the need of young girls’ labour, is not self-evident. One of the three reasons why the relation between girl’s hand labour and footbinding has been neglected by so many observers and scholars, Bossen and Gates points out, is that previous researchers were reluctant to believe that mothers would cripple their daughters in order to make them work. The authors attempt to explain this argument by suggesting that infant killing or the extreme disciplining of children are not uncommon in Chinese history or even today

However, this could not explain the universality of foot-binding. After all, infant killing was not carried out in every single family, whereas footbinding was. This argument needs to be illustrated with further evidence, probably by using the first-hand narratives of women. The following questions are left unanswered: did mothers use footbinding as a tool to make their daughters work diligently, from a very young age, intentionally or subconsciously? Is it possible that mothers sincerely believed foot-binding was necessary for their daughters to enter into marriage, and that the usage of their labour was just a side product? Was it really necessary to keep girls working through this extreme method? How can we explain that some girls had their feet bound before or after the age of doing handwork, at the age of four, or fifteen?

In addition, in challenging the idea that women bound their daughters’ feet so they could get married in the future, this book has limited success. As a cause- effect study, this study only measures the relationship between female labour and foot-binding, without taking marriage as a variable. Therefore, it could not decide which reason is more significant.

A (shorter) paper by the same authors is more of the same. Lots of general historical and economic information, information on when a shift away from manual to factory textile production happened and when foot-binding shifts happened, claims they happened at the same time, but correlation isn't causation. Paragraphs like these don't inspire confidence - they say they did it for marriage, but is that plausible? No, because old fashions don't change that easily. The reason must be something they didn't mention at all.

Informants generally do not remember this transformation, which came about rapidly within a decade, as a product of political change. Some men­ tioned that various government inspectors enforced a ban on footbinding and even unbound women’s feet, confiscating the bindings, or levying fines for the offence. However, women resisted the change and continued to believe that footbinding was important for arranging a good marriage; many reported hiding from inspectors and surreptitiously resuming binding after the cam­ paign was over. On the other hand, many of those who abandoned footbind­ ing explained that “society changed” or “fashion changed.” How were “society” and “fashion” able to stop so suddenly a severe bodily practice that had persisted for centuries despite previous government bans?

It is unrealistic to expect that village women and girls, who were almost universally illiterate, understood the global economic forces that were changing their household economies. Old women asserted that as young girls they simply did what their elders told them to do. If they protested, they were beaten. Why did their elders suddenly change their mind and stop insisting upon this prac­ tice? Even though villagers do not explicitly mention the changing markets and prices that affected their livelihoods, we can surmise that they were in fact affected.

This seems reasonably analogous to circumcision. The somewhat unconvincing justifications, the historical tradition. This is just the way things are done. As a cut dude that isn't all that mad about it I could easily describe the practice in as dehumanizing words as you. It's a pretty fucked up thing they did for centuries and they stopped as far as I can tell, that puts them ahead of us in circumcision and in some sense slavery(is it too absurd if I decide arbitrarily to bound foot binding between these two practices?). I've spent much time in America with first and second generation Chinese people, they are as varied as any other. They understand and are unhappy about being discriminated against by affirmative action. In response to the crime wave some bought guns and I got to be present when one family who bought one was showing it and discussing the issue with another family. The second generation and onwards understands and absorbs our memes as well as any other group of kids I've known. The first generation seems to respect the idea that they've moved to a place with different values and tries to assimilate. These are our people, these are Americans. Some of them have stories reminiscent of my own ancestor's coming to this place, and they got citizenship the proper and legal way. They are ours and no one else's

in as dehumanizing words as you

i can't tell if you meant to imply i was moralizing against a chinese practice, but I was solely interested in bosen's work as anthropology / something to factcheck, as opposed to making a point about how friend or enemy the chinese are. I agree that chinese seem to have a similar set of variation in 'innate' traits that whites do, and culturally adopt values in the same way everyone does*. Plenty of stuff subgroups of white people did in ancient times was as "cruel" as footbinding.

* There probably are racial differences (aside from intelligence) in ... all sorts of things ""behaviorally"", just because individual genetic variation is plentiful, but what they are I (genuinely) have no idea what they might be, and they could be very different from the what one might guess.

I’m reminded of FGM in Africa, where by all accounts it’s the women doing it over the protests of men. Surely part of the explanation could be ‘male heads of household stopped their female dependents from doing this thing that they’d previously been only dimly aware of after being threatened by the government’.

I remember this being said somewhere, does anyone have the article demonstrating this to be the case?

I want to read it again and see what it said.

On second thought this was a poor and lazy suggestion (made after being rudely awakened by an errant delivery man and trying to fall back asleep); I've forgotten where a proper collection of interviews was, and it looked like Bossen cites some of those women after collecting thousands of interviews under the scope of the project, so I linked to the article, but really there's no reason to recommend the book itself if it doesn't provide their narratives in as raw a form as possible. If you have better suggestions, please share.

Bossen, being a cultural anthropologist, is doing the usual orthodox Marxist «social being determines consciousness» thing where unappealing cultural practices are chalked up to expressions of the preceding profit motive. Her interpretation is not as valuable as opinions of those women, specifically for purposes of commenting on the morality of the practice.

Personally I think that the Chinese really are stricter with their kids, and Chinese kids really are more tolerant of discomfort, severe discipline and obeying social demands. Sometimes the racists compare Chinese people to ants and such because of this; but if anything, overpowering inhibitory control is a particularly human trait, the hallmark of neurological maturity (there's an obvious effortpost here). Like I've suggested in my original response to @Lepidus, the «Chinese mentality» may be a product of a common evolutionary trend in complex societies that has advanced further in the Chinese than in Europeans, a trend we would do well to account for and perhaps counteract.

In any case, parents abusing and distorting children with the rational goal of providing them a higher-status future are the historical norm; and causing physical deformities to fit children into the socially approved mold is quite on par with what we're doing by confining them to schools (yes, yes the EB schtick). 10-12 of the most formative years of our lives spent in the framework where our most rewarded virtues are obedience and patience toward absurdity, our peers are mostly uncultured swine obsessed with prison-tier hierarchical competition, and our authority figures are the equivalent of power-tripping reddit jannies – and I think this is the typical school experience for an above-average kid in a non-exceptional school – is abject moral catastrophe, one that also perpetuates these evils into adulthood. This is only not seen as horror for the same reason some Chinese excuse footbinding: false consciousness and accurate recognition of good intentions behind the horror. There is no real cruelty in what is done to children.

Love can be pretty terrifying is all.


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