This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It has happened. The transgender trend has hit close to home, with a close relative now insisting that we call his five-year-old, penis-having child a "girl." I have had a couple of conversations with the dad, and he repeated of the common transgender talking points. He was at least open to conversation. He did not seem to have been exposed to counter-arguments or to have thought through what he was doing. So I am writing the dad a very long email. Much of the email is quotes from desisters, excerpts from news stories, and reviews of the studies. But I thought I'd share with this forum some of the theory portions that I wrote. Maybe you will find it informative, or maybe you can help strengthen my writing. This is written under a throwaway, names and details are changed to protect the guilty and innocent.
Why biological sex and not 'gender identity' matters for norms, culture and language
When we last talked, I said it was important at this age to correct Skylar about his gender even as a five-year-old, because even at this point it is the role of a parent to guiding him to be a man. You replied that you don't want to raise kids to conform to stereotypes.
Now I don't feel any need to raise a boy to like whiskey and pickup trucks, or to raise a girl to like Barbie dolls. In fact, when first buying clothes for my daughter Jessica I was moderately peeved there were so few unisex options. I wanted to buy neutral clothes to save money for reuse with any future boy.
But there are essential sex differences, rooted in the basic biology of sex, that impact norms and culture around sex.
The most important is that women have the potential to make men immortal. For tens of millions of years of mammalian evolution, the pregnancy and nursing process has been the expensive part of reproduction. Women are the reproduction bottleneck. Much flows from this basic difference.
For a woman, simply acting pretty, helpful, and caring is a viable strategy for having a great life. She can find a man who will become attached to her and provide her all she needs. Note: this is not necessarily the optimal strategy, but it is a viable one. I don't want Jessica to be a princess. Some training in hard work, getting her fingernails dirty, and callouses on her fingers is good ... But she should also know how to be charming and cute and pretty because that will in fact get a girl far in life.)
For men, this is not a viable strategy. Men must develop strength and competencies.
I'm going to paraphrase a passage I found a while ago that really resonated with me:
Thus, raising a boy to be a man means gradually building their power level and gradually teaching them that the world will only care for you if you build something and make something of yourself. Childhood is going to end some day and no one will listen to your whining.
Whereas for a girl, they will hit 18 or 19 and suddenly have massive amounts of power purely on account of who they are. A pretty 20-year-old intern can make the CEO of a billion dollar company stutter and blush merely on account of how she looks. She will get stares and attention from men of all sorts. Thus the job of father in raising a daughter is both protecting her from the men who would prey on her, and also teaching her not to abuse or misuse this sexual power she will have. The father must teach her to leverage the power in goods ways to build a great situation while she is young, because she will lose the power as she gets older.
And in this, Skylar is irrevocably a boy, not a girl. You can already see it in Skylar's face. Men have evolved over a long time a fine sense of distinction between men and women, and almost no person born as biological male, with body parts and facial structure and brain developing under the influence of male hormones, can ever pass a girl. A woman who is by chance infertile still triggers men and woman, to treat her as a woman. A male on cross-sex hormones might fool someone at a surface level, but after any meaningful interaction an uncanny valley effect will be triggered. Other people might go along with it out of "nice", but they won't treat a male-to-female transgender as an actual woman in many of the ways that actually matter.
For a biological male, like Skylar, the test in life will come against other biological males. It will also be biological males who will be his future allies in competing against other groups of men -- whether in fighting, business ventures or being wing-man. Since childhood is the preparation for growing up, it is important from childhood to be socialized as a male, competing and cooperating with other males. Otherwise he will arrive at young adulthood, and the girls he was friends will forget him, as they will be interested in actual masculine guys, and he will not have the experience in relating to other guys as guys.
The second basic difference in male and female is the level of hormesis they can withstand. Growth and improvement in many matters from athletics to chess is getting enough struggle to trigger growth, but not so much that you become just damaged and discouraged. Simply put, boys and men can withstand a much greater deal of physical and psychological trial than girls and women can. The optimal level of training is far different. Physical training that will truly test a young man will destroy a woman's pelvic bone. Criticism that a man needs to be able to handle, will make a woman break down in tears (almost every woman I know has cried at work, very few men I know have).
Now a common refrain is "some girls can handle it, we shouldn't make assumptions." This is anti-knowledge -- we should start with assumption of averages and then be flexible about outliers. Furthermore, nothing I have seen in our kids indicates that we are outliers from the biological sex in terms of stereotypical traits. Nothing I have seen from any of the parents or grandparents either. I think that people commonly underestimate just how big the differences are, possibly because of so many strong female characters that have been added to entirely fictional movies, or because of headlines about some women breaking a sex barrier in some traditionally male line of work.
In reality, The bell curves of physical abilities barely overlap. For instance, in studies of grip strength the average man had a greater grip strength than every single female in the general study population. A 75th percentile male had a greater grip strength than every single elite female athlete in the study.
If you consider both upper body strength, weight, body size, skull structure a typical man punching a woman does not do 25% more damage than vice versa, but something like 1,000% more damage.
(continued in a reply)
As a trans woman, this post is like reading the world view of someone from a completely different civilisation. While I did grow up as a male, none of the points you mention about it hit close to home - I don't know how much of it is because I grew up outside of the Anglosphere, and because of my personal background. I was going to write a lengthy quote-by-quote reply, but I think it would suffice to say that all of your points would do as well to convince any pro-trans, liberal person as a trying to convince an atheist vegan to eat meat by invoking the Bible. It's not just the facts you mentioned that are dispute, but the very core values.
The transgender debate is tiresome at this point, but what draws my attention more is the gender essentialist arguments you mentioned, especially with regards to interactions between men and women. I've personally mostly grown up friends with women (although it has varied depending on the years), as they were a lot friendlier and I had more shared interests, and with none of the issues your described. I'm not even gay (I used to be 50-50 bisexual prior to transitioning, now it's about 95-5 in favor of men).
Would you rather your daughter go on a sleepover alone with a masculine lesbian friend, or a very feminine gay boy? What about a trans guy of the same age, vs. a trans girl, both being straight (i.e., the trans guy is attracted to women and the trans girl to men).
I have often been the only male in a group and this has not happened. If anything, I would be vastly more awkward in a traditionally masculine men-only group, due to having few interests in common, and I would be far more sexually attracted to them. When I was with a group of male friends and an attractive guy I had a crush on joined, I developed those behaviours you mention - white knighting, favouritism, always taking his side, etc. It has nothing to do with the sex of the person, and you should learn to deal with it rather than avoid the opposite sex altogether.
This just seems sad. Are you clearly not capable of having deep one-on-one time with a woman without it being potentially sexual? I'm sexually attracted to a lot of my male friends and I had to learn to resist the temptation, and was able to develop strong friendships with people I was attracted to regardless of their gender.
I've shared beds and hotel rooms with both men and women with no issue. I'm bi and could potentially have sex with anyone I spent the night with - should my boyfriend be anxious whenever I'm alone with literally anyone? Especially in my liberal circles, a lot of people are bi, or open-minded enough to have sex with a trans woman.
I was a feminine bisexual man and this was not my experience. If anything, women were even more interested in me, both sexually and as friends, once I became an adult. Flip it around - wouldn't you rather have your girlfriend be interested in the same masculine hobbies you have, than feminine ones you have 0 interest in? It's the same with women.
That I don't get. We gender people based on secondary sexual characteristics, not biological sex. If you see someone who looks like Hunter Schafer or Emma Ellingsen (https://aschehoug.no/media/catalog/author/e/m/emma_ellingsen_foto_jakob_landvik_mg_7819.jpg), your brain will go "she" and you will have to correct yourself. If you're meeting Emma at a restaurant and you say "I'm meeting a blond guy" to the waiter, do you think you'll be pointed in the right direction? If you're mugged by Buck Angel, are you going to point and yell "catch her, that woman robbed me!"? Even Ben Shapiro had to correct himself when he subconsciously referred to Hunter by she/her.
Yes. And I feel that way when suddenly my relative is claiming their little boy with a penis is really a girl.
Hard no to all of these. I don't want the lesbian trying to get my daughter into "experimenting." And I have no guarantee the gay boy isn't sometimes into sex with women, a lot of guys who might seem gay will swing both ways now and then. Also, there is just a very basic difference in values between those of people who identify as gay or trans, and the values I want to foster in my family.
Actually, I think this supports the idea that men's clubs should not just be men only, but straight men only. I've seen gay drama blow up numerous groups. And the most successful fraternities I have been a part of have excluded men who have made boning other men part of their identity.
And of course, I don't avoid the opposite sex altogether, I spend most of my time with the opposite sex. Most of my straight guy friends with wives and daughters and in-laws and children's parents friends hardly ever get away from the opposite sex. That is why it is important to set some time and space aside for a men's only group, it's something most modern men are missing out on.
Do you have deep one-on-one friendships with other gay men that stay entirely non-sexual with no drama over a long time?
Back in college I had deep, non-sexual, one-on-one time with girls. It can work for a while if both of you have the understanding that you aren't really right for each other. It ends up being a kind of mutual "back-up girlfriend" / "back-up boyfriend" kind of thing. But it wasn't stable long-term. Someone either catches feelings, or gets a steady relationship and grows apart. A lot of the deep one-on-one time is talking about dating other people, but once you are married, it feels unseemly to be talking about relationship problems with another women. Also, there isn't much relationship drama to make interesting conversation. And in general, without an element of flirting and sexual tension, I don't actually find women that interesting to talk to. The number of friendships I can maintain is limited by my free-time. So all-in-all, I do not miss out on having deep one-on-one friendships with other women.
Have you made substantial commitments and sacrifices in order to build a household and family together? Are you both committed to monogamy?
Also, the sexuality of a born biological-male-person-who-is-attracted-to-men is not at all the same as a biological womans. You can't cuck him, hypergamy and pair-bonding doesn't work the same when in gay men as it does in straight women, etc. etc.
This is a fair criticism -- although in this case my relative boy who says he is a girl is not actually feminine and does not have feminine hobbies. A weak, effeminate, opposite-of-Chad boy with male nerd hobbies will have a lot of trouble relating with the ladies.
I think that conception of being trans - that someone is on some level the opposite sex but trapped in the wrong body - to be misleading. It's not that the little boy is a girl, it's that the little boy is unhappy being a boy and would prefer being a girl, or as close to one as you can get with modern medicine.
What's wrong with your daughter experimenting - and there's a chance any girl your daughter is with could be bisexual or attracted to women, not just the obvious masculine lesbians. I take it you wouldn't prevent a hypothetical son from hanging out with girls though? Double standards like these were a contributing factor in me being very upset with cis-heterosexual norms.
Also, good luck enforcing your values in your family - plenty have tried and failed. The odds are in favour of your daughter rebelling against your strict parenting in her teenage years as countless have done before, and if you are not preparing her to deal with the modern world - such as teaching her safe sex - the consequences could be dire.
Sure, I'm not sexually interested in most gay men anyway. Post-transition, most aren't interested in me.
I thought married people loved to complain about their spouse? That's one of the stereotypes I heard. Anyway I suppose it is telling that you don't find women interesting to talk to. I personally find the average woman easier/more interesting to talk to than the average neurotypical straight man (I do like artsy guys or men on the spectrum, as long as they're not into anime, Marvel or video games).
That's another reason I didn't like dating gay men, my sexuality is closer to that of biological women (I've discovered that while talking to my female friends in detail). I'm more hypergamous than promiscuous and don't really get anything out of hook-ups, and very much like the whole ritual of flirting, seduction, dating, etc. which is not very popular in gay men - most just wanted to have sex one the first date or even without even a first date.
Well I was a weak effeminate opposite-of-Chad boy with male nerd hobbies - books, D&D, comics - and in the few years I spent in public school, the only ones that shared my nerdy hobbies were girls. When I joined the school D&D group, the only other male was the teacher who organised it. All the high-achieving students - girls (and me). It was only when I went to a private school that I could finally meet guys I related to, but still my friendship groups were mostly female. I grew out of my nerdy childhood interests and became more interested in relationship drama, fashion and art though, so perhaps that's a contributing factor.
To the same sex!
Earlier in the month I had to vent a bit about how the rent in the apartment my partner and I are renting has gone up by 35% year-over-year, but because my partner really doesn’t want to move (and will make up actually ridiculous reasons to convince me/herself to not move, things like “the main road in this suburb is too wide”) we have in the end decided to just stay in the same place, paying nearly $900 extra each month. Who did I complain to? Other men (mostly)!
Don’t do this, please. You’re trying to build consensus about how your experience is the normal/right one and that finding men more pleasant conversation partners is somehow indicative of a defect. We could turn this around:
Would that be an appropriate conclusion to draw out or to say?
I suppose I should add a bit of my own experience. I personally find women somewhat easier to talk to (even with that stereotype of women being more on guard around men — clearly men aren’t playing on “lovecraftian horror story difficulty mode”), and women tend to make the conversation experience more pleasant, but talking to men in-depth (which is rarer) tends to be much more interesting, especially when things get more abstract. I also find it difficult to believe that men on the spectrum are better to talk to than normal men, at least of similar intellectual caliber and interests, having interacted with many men on the spectrum myself, since childhood.
I do personally think it says more about you — your interests and personality, if not your biases or your approach to conversation — that you find talking to women and autistic/artsy men more interesting, though I also don’t think that’s really much of a positive or negative, and I share some (but not most) of your intuitions here, especially around women being easier to “talk to”. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to draw normative conclusions and values out of this.
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't let my son sleepover a girls when he is a teen either.
I basically think that traditional Christian norms are the best route toward living a happy, fulfilling, productive life. That is, date people of the opposite sex, don't have sex with someone you don't see yourself marrying, preferably wait until after marriage. Love your spouse forever, have lots of children. Some people are of dispositions that make this path more difficult, but it is the path I think it is best to encourage. I don't think being a lesbian is innate and I think it best to be discouraged. I think sexuality is more malleable than people think. She should aspire to have a husband, and for her children to have a dad. There is a trope that being a strict, conservative parent will only drive your kid to rebel and make them more sexually deviant. This has not been my observation. Yes it happens, and the one's who do rebel can be VERY vocal, but in general, one's children are more likely to have your values if you actually work to pass on your values. And statistically, it seems like the conservative families are doing much better these days on measures of well-being and mental health.
Perhaps this is true. That being said: for young Westerners I don't think that there is enough societal pressure and support to keep a gay person married to an opposite-sex partner for more than a decade, maybe two. If you're very religious/conservative suggesting that gays should be celibate is probably the better way to go...it leads to less personal and family wreckage.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have a difficult question that you don’t have to respond to if that’s your choice. And I ask this sincerely. How does a trans woman plan for middle age and thereafter? As challenging as it must be for a young person to be trans, it strikes me that biological male bodies age very distinctly. It must be a whole different set of challenges. I know I have a bit of a beer belly myself. And while I’m fortunate to have my hair, I suspect most males have to worry about going bald. Ear hair was nonexistent until I hit 40. It seems like a something that is challenging under the best of conditions becomes completely insurmountable.
That’s actually a very good question - the answer is that with feminising HRT, you won’t age as a male at all. Estrogen gives you a feminine fat distribution - hips, breasts and bum instead of a beer belly - along with softer skin. Female-level testosterone means body hair is substantially reduced (although I’m still getting laser to be sure), masculinisation of the face and body is halted, and low DHT ensures you don’t go bald (although you won’t magically recover your hairline if it’s already gone).
My fear of aging as a male was part of my motivations for transitioning, and I’m essentially safe from that now. And past a certain age, both men and women kinda start looking the same anyway, outside of hair loss and facial hair. Men’s testosterone naturally lowers with age, and women are far removed from menopause. Trans woman might even age better than cis women as they don’t go through the latter and can maintain appropriate levels of estrogen indefinitely.
I think females would also maintain higher levels of estrogen indefinitely if they were supplementing with synthetic hormones?
Yes, in fact post-menopausal women are the biggest consumers of hormone replacement therapy. However it's very tricky and has many potential side effects and risk of some cancers if not adequately managed - I've read studies where it was suggested that the benefits did not outweigh the risk unless it was started before menopause.
So what data do we have on the use of these hormones by males? Facially it's not obvious why these side effects would be sex dependent.
The side effects aren't side effects of HRT, per se, but rather effects of lifetime estrogen exposure. For example, women who start menopause later than average have a higher risk of breast cancer than women who don't - and so do women who go on HRT after menopause. In both cases, the risk comes from an extra X years of exposure to estrogen.
And indeed, those risks exist for trans women too. But someone who transitions as an adult will almost certainly have less lifetime exposure to estrogen than the average cis woman.
What about someone who has their puberty blocked and starts taking the hormones as soon as legally possible?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How could a transwoman age better than a woman?
Isn't the aspiration to be a woman?
If you don't look like a woman in your elder years, aren't you failing your stated goal?
Trans women will look younger than cis-women of the same age is what I meant. Surely you must be familiar with how obsessed many women are with looking younger, how does it not make sense that trans women would aspire to stay youthful as well?
So your desire is not to be like a woman, but to perform like a woman or even outperform women.
What a coincidence that this is the type of brain impulse that Satan (through the people in charge of society) would like us to adopt.
Let's not care about our nation, our culture, our ancestors, our descendants
The easiest way to look like a woman would be to become morbidly obese.
Look how similar a morbidly man and woman look next to each other.
It seems possible that you may be suffering from some form of anorexia.
I was watching the Cartoon Network the other day and they have ads playing every 10min, among which ones for skin rejuvenating products. Probably targeted at women who keep the TV on for their kids.
Is it possible that early exposure to constant streams of such media somehow met a sensitive hormonal terrain in you and induced you to desire becoming the youthful, attractive, happy woman in the ad?
Either way, the industrial society and its consequences are certainly to blame, and I hope for your sake that the Science somehow finds a cure, and I remind everybody to vote by mail.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
First, let me say that I appreciate you commenting, since so many posters here are conservative and/or rightist, so it's nice to also hear from people with a different perspective. That being said, I'm still going to disagree with you, since that's kind of the point of this place.
It sounds like you are a homosexual transsexual (HSTS) to use Blanchard's typology, which means you are quite different from autogynephiles like Contrapoints. I don't think your experiences are typical of trans-identified males in general.
No, we use those secondary sexual characteristics to attempt to infer biological sex, much like how you might infer that the person wearing a police uniform and driving a police car is, in fact, a police officer.
It's certainly possible to pretend to be something you're not, with various levels of success. Military imposters are virtually universally scorned for their duplicity. The same is true for race-fakers like Rachel Dolezal. I would put sex-fakers in the same category and afford them little sympathy.
Again, it's definitely possible to fake your sex, the same way I might be able to convince people that I'm a police officer or a Nigerian Prince. But of course that doesn't really prove anything more than the fact that people can be fooled.
Honestly the focus on appearance over substance sounds like a motte-and-bailey argument: the motte is that some people are so good at faking their sex they are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, and the bailey is that anyone who identifies as a woman becomes one.
Personally I don't think that transgender people are particularly good at faking their sex. Natalie Wynn still strikes me as a male despite the enormous amount of effort she puts into passing. Other people are even less succesfull.
To that point, it's funny that you mentioned Buck Angel: I like him a lot, but he vaguely passes as a male only if you limit yourself to looking at his highly-edited photos. In real life he's a 60-year-old, squeaky-voiced, 5'8" manlet. The idea that he could successfully rob anyone who couldn't be robbed by a woman is preposterous. Never mind the fact that he's just too nice to do something like that: he is, despite his gender identification, still very much female at heart. It's really weird to me that genderists champion him as the obvious example of a woman-who-has-become-a-man when, if you dive below the surface, he is not a typical male at all.
So put your cards on the table. Do you think that recognizing someone as a woman is contingent on them passing as one? If so, do you agree that it is more than fair to call obvious men like Lia Thomas, Rachel Levine, Emilia Decaudin, Jessica Yaniv, Alok Vaid Menon, etc. men?
Or do you think, according to the common leftist talking point, that a woman is everyone who says they are, regardless of how poorly they pass? If you belief the latter, it seems irrelevant that some transwomen might pass relatively well.
Nah. Under Blanchard's typology, this would absolutely disqualify her from being classified as HSTS:
HSTS is defined as being exclusively attracted to men; anyone who started out as a heterosexual, bisexual, or even asexual man could only be classified as AGP.
Kind of ironic to see this in the same comment as strict Blanchardianism. As the theory goes, HSTS are able to pass much more convincingly and effortlessly.
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you, I see a lot of posts about trans issues here but I don’t see many from actual trans people, so I thought it could be an interesting perspective.
I think there’s a few different clusters of trans women and more than just the two Blanchard identified. I don’t know if the so-called AGP types are the majority, or if they’re just more visible - something like 50% of transwomen identify as bisexual, from what I remember.
That’s a difference in values between us; you consider sex to be an important characteristic that carries with it a certain weight and thus should be truthfully communicated, while I think it’s an unfortunate holdover from our evolutionary history that has trapped people in roles they didn’t want, both biologically and socially. I recognise the usefulness of having police officers and military service members be correctly identified, but I think the sooner we make biological sex irrelevant, the better.
I don’t view my transition as “faking” being a woman. I’m taking medication that truly does give me female sexual secondary sexual characteristics, and even alters my neurochemistry to be closer to cis women’s. I think it would be accurate to describe me as chemically intersex - medically speaking, I need to be checked for both breast cancer and prostate cancer, for instance. Otherwise I don’t intentionally go about trying to be called a woman, although I’m happy if I do.
My mental concept of them is “men”, yes. But I respect non-passing trans women’s pronouns and gender identity out of kindness and empathy, in the same way I won’t call someone ugly or fat to their face because it’s insulting and unproductive, and there’s no benefit to drawing attention to that fact in most contexts. If prompted, I can give advice on how to pass better in the same way I’d give advice on how to lose weight.
I actually think that argument is much better for gender than it is for sex. Gender roles are in many, many ways entirely irrelevant in the modern world. Child rearing and housekeeping has gotten so efficient that it simply makes no sense to keep women in the kitchen, as the saying goes. Physical fighting and hunting is even worse, both have been effectively completely replaced and the obvious male optimisations towards it are pointless now. Instead, almost everyone is doing office or light physical work that can be done by both sexes, and that both sexes are clearly broadly unoptimised for.
A pet theory of mine is that a lot of the modern confusion around gender and sex stems from the fact that in the ancestral environment sex differences were just so obvious that there was no chance to become confused, so we didn't evolve to recognize our sex outside of them. If you go fight to protect your family because you're obviously much more physically capable than your sister, while your sister got pregnant at 14 from her husband, it really makes no sense whatsoever to ask "maybe I'm a woman?". I know the alleged trans identities of some older traditions, but they're almost exclusively weak submissive males that probably would have been killed or left to die being allowed to instead serve as prostitutes for the capable men, and they're deliberately kept apart and considered distinct from the women.
On the other hand sex: As another transhumanist, I don't mind eventually abolishing it! But the reality is, we can't. For the foreseeable future, you'll need a women to create a new human being. Insemination is not quite as far off, but still for the time being AFAIK only possible from male to female. Likewise, there are massive hormonal differences and otherwise between the sexes that make them very distinct across a wider range of attributes. Most notably the massive physical differences. If I want to date you, I want to know your sex, not your gender; If I'm working with you, I want to know neither. HRT can make you more similar to the other sex, but is still very crude and only includes a portion of the hormonal differences between the sexes.
And to go further, most trans people I've met or indirectly heard about quite frankly still make more sense to be grouped in with their sex than with their alleged gender. I don't know you and so don't take this personally, just talking from my own average experience. I'm usually respecting everyone's wishes in regard to pronouns and such and have no desire to insult anyone in person, but I'm being a bit candid since I want to be clear on my impressions.
Most MtFs have stereotypically male hobbies and jobs, male mannerisms and blatantly obviously male bodies. Joking about G.I.R.L.s in video games is only half a joke; MtFs are so ridiculously overrepresented in techie spaces that you will frequently run into places with more MtFs than cis women. They're much more similar to the typical shy male nerd than any women. MtFs are also very commonly hyper-sexual compared to women; physically speaking they look like someone wanted to turn a scarecrow into a blow-up sex doll. All the online "passing" MtFs I've seen do not pass anymore once you see their movements in a video or hear their voice. If you look up these " first female to do X" news where X is a super-stereotypical male job or hobby, it's extremely disproportionally an MtF.
FtMs on the other hand I've almost exclusively ran into thanks to my wife, since they are quite common in, you guessed, female-dominated fields like psychology. The two I've personally met and talked with could easily star as the main character of any female librarian anime (and in fact had similar jobs). They were less superficially female, but overall had a clearly quite sensitive feminine personalities. Physically speaking, they're tiny dorky guys with a silly sounding voice (and frankly Buck Angel is as well, not to mention Elliot Page!). They're not or minimally interested in any stereotypically male hobby. I don't know it personally for these two, but FtMs AFAIK have the typical lesbian dead bedroom issues as well.
These differences become most obvious once you see their behaviour around babies and small children that aren't theirs; MtFs are often entirely uninterested just like cis men, while FtMs are often actively thrilled like cis women.
It's clear to me that gender is the unfortunate evolutionary holdover that has become unnecessary, while sex is a basic biological category that we will not get rid off for the time being.
I don't buy this. If you look at the actual real work being done, most of the work that ends up providing food, shelter, tools, etc. is done by men. Men still do the policing and the fighting, women cops and soldiers are a joke.
Doing child rearing well is not that much more efficient. Running a household with multiple children is still a full-time job, and still done primarily by women, whether mom's or childcare workers. Institutional childcare for infants and toddlers, with moms working in an office is not actually an efficient situation. It's incredibly stressful for the parents and suboptimal for the kids. It would not be a thing without subsidies, affirmative action, and extensive propaganda.
Women's jobs tend to either be:
Caring directly for children and the infirm -- the same work women always did.
Bureaucratic make work
Work that is leveraging female sexuality -- I include in this almost all sales, marketing, baristas, waitresses, etc. Even for most office jobs, I believe that women's productivity is massively overrated and they are usually hired as affirmative action hires or as a perk for the productive male workers.
It's not a novelty of modernity that women can make money outside of the home. It is only in the late stage of civilizational degeneracy that women are allowed to work outside the home, and think that other things are more important than raising their own children. Historically, they would be working outside the home as dancers, geishas, actresses, socialites, prostitutes, etc.
What I think has changed is mass media and mass education. We are bombarded with fictional imagery of fighting women, working women, productive women in the office, bad-ass women, etc. so we ignore our own personal experiences, and instead take what we see in movies and on TV as the default. We are given years of schooling where what we believe is dictated by who can rewrite the textbooks, and not by a slowly evolved tradition that gets taught from parent to child.
But yes, the concept of "gender roles", that is, the idea that the cultural roles we associated with men and women are somehow separate from biological sex, is entirely novel. And it is wrong, it is an anti-concept. Societies have "sex roles", not "gender roles."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As a transhumanist, I very much agree. My only issue with current trans people (barring the more odious aspects of the ideology) is that they're jumping the gun. By all means, if you want to change sex, don't let me or anyone else stop you, but if you do, at least do a good job of it!
And unfortunately, medical science as of 2023 is entirely inadequate to the task, and in all likelihood will continue to be till we're in an outright singularity.
And even if modern attempts to pass are usually terrible and unconvincing, my only other issue is with attempts to get additional rights on the basis of identified sex, not that I think additional rights for any gender are warranted. Fuck female only sports as far as I'm concerned, that's just the kiddie league.
Female only sports are not a right, they are a charity. We want women to be engaged in sport instead of being stomped into the dirt by middle-aged amateurs. That's not an exaggeration. "Middling level" male athletes will trounce female athletes on the regular.
We need to recognize the necessity of the these sports and their basis on biology and not some notions of gender identity. So trans "athletes" don't get to participate in the other's sports. It's not about how you identify yourself. It's about your physical structure and bone density / muscle mass.
And no being on HRT for a few years does not change your body to be identical to a CIS woman's.
I mean, I for one am not interested in the least in said charity! It's the equivalent of watching Little League baseball as a hobby, with the only saving grace being nice asses to look at.
Given that porn is a thing, if you want to see multiple woman grappling, grunting, growling and getting hot and sweaty, I can't say I care in the least.
(I am perfectly aware the women are grossly inferior in physicality, but my overall position is the fewer restrictions on sports the better, I'd actually pay for a Transhuman Olympics where everyone is allowed to take PEDs, chop off their legs like Oscar, anything it takes to get an edge. Not this namby pamby boring nonsense.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Overall I agree with a lot of your points, but this kind of stuck out to me.
That's not exactly correct. We use secondary sexual characteristics to infer what someone's biological sex is, and then apply gendered terms based on that. It was never the case (imo) that gendered terms were based on secondary sex characteristics, it's that you can't very well stick your hand down someone's pants to see what they're packing before you decide to to address them as sir/ma'am. It seems to me that you've mistaken a proxy measurement for the actual thing we are talking about when we say man/woman.
I do see your point, although I'd say it's more that language didn't develop in an environment where there was any distinction to be made between the proxy measurement and biological sex. Linguistically speaking, I think it makes more sense for "man/woman" to refer to the phenotype - the traits and appearance - and "male/female" to the karyotype - the genetic sex - and due to the practical impossibility of verifying the latter in typical social interactions, to use pronouns depending on appearance. I don't see how insisting that pronouns be used according to biological sex and not how the person would be perceived by bystanders is useful or practical.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link