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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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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:

The biggest difference between men and women is that when you're a man, the absolute indifference of the universe towards you is the norm, it will only care when you make it care, and only for brief moments. To women this is almost Lovecraftian horror they can't conceive of. Men don't realize that most women can never comprehend this because it's just too horrifying to the female psychology. Women live their entire lives knowing people care about them, they take it for granted, it's the universal constant norm for 95 percent of women. We care about them as children because humans generally care about the happiness and suffering of all children. Most women are pleasing to look at, so we look at them. When women are ugly or annoying, we pay attention to them even if it's negative attention.Even when women are shitty we pay some form of attention to them, people care about annoying women because they are hard to ignore. People care about women in distress or sadness because we just do. We want to save women in danger. This has nothing to do with their achievements, their character, just that they are women. When this constant electromagnetic field of empathy around them weakens a bit, particularly middle aged single women with no children, they talk about how cruel it is to be "invisible"

If you're a man, it's the inverse. The universe and the people in it are a yawning void of indifference, you are responsible for yourself. If you're sad you are expected to buck up, if you are having problems you are expected to fix them. If you are too annoying you will be dismissed, told off, or get your ass kicked. If people care about you it's because you built relationships with them that made you a person they care about. If people admire you it's because you built a reputation, a physique, or an empire. Cries for help from women are almost always answered, cries for help from men rarely are, be they metaphorical or literal. If you're a man, you need to understand that most women cannot understand or grok this. If you're a woman, you should try to comprehend that burden men have.

I'm not even knocking this state of affairs. I don't support the whole "Men should cry more and be more sensitive and raise a fuss" effeminate bullshit. The yawning void of indifference is our burden to bear by virtue of being men, you aren't a man without it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have confidants to help you. Other men who can relate to this yawning chasm, to the struggles men face. Women can provide comfort and empathy, but most of them won't really and truly intellectually grasp and understand this difference. You should always have fraternal bonds with other men to commiserate over, to share knowledge of similar experiences to help each other overcome obstacles and achieve things. Brotherhood is important, you aren't complete without it.

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).

The temptation issue is also why I would never allow my daughter when she is 14-years old to go on a sleepover alone with any guy. It's not so much about the guy being a potential "rapist" -- it's about the very real possibility they both could be succumb to temptation.

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 believe that men and women have a deep need for spending at least some time in sex segregated clubs. And this is rooted in biology in all the biology I noted above, that men and women have different strengths to develop and challenges to overcome. When you add just one opposite person to a group the dynamic changes -- immediately you get status posturing, sexual drama, and white knighting.

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.

From time-to-time, I sometimes do an overnight getaway and spend a night out on the town with an old friend, maybe I crash on his couch, etc. As a married man, I feel like this would be very inappropriate to do with a woman. Even if I had certainty that it would be entirely chaste, it would cause my wife anxiety. But I also don't even want to lead myself into temptation.

Time away spent purely in fun with a woman friend might seem magical...temptation would arise... From everything I've heard, deep one-on-one time with someone of the opposite sex is the fast road to ruining a marriage.

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.

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.

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.

When I say with regards to a person 'he is a boy' the words 'he' and 'boy' refer to biological sex, as the words always have meant in the English language up until a few years ago.

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.

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.

We gender people based on secondary sexual characteristics, not biological sex.

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.

If you see someone who looks like Hunter Schafer or Emma Ellingsenyour brain will go "she" and you will have to correct yourself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would put sex-fakers in the same category and afford them little sympathy.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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:

  1. Caring directly for children and the infirm -- the same work women always did.

  2. Bureaucratic make work

  3. 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.

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.

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."