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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   3944 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

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Zooey Zephyr, a Montana State Representative has been censured for comments made regarding a bill state policy on gender transition services. Zephyr is now suing, as reported by the AP. There's much that could be discussed here, but this is the small-scale thread, and I want to do a quick survey on the aesthetics presented by Zephyr in this photo that seems intended to be iconic for Zephyr's supporters. What do you see? What feeling does that photo summon for you?

I'll be blunt - I see a ridiculous man, a parody of someone playing dress-up as a woman, attempting to evoke the imagery of the Civil Rights movement, but succeeding only in creating a repellant and somewhat pitiable facsimile thereof. I suspect that my ideological opponents on this are intended to see a brave woman, standing up to the bullies on the other side of the aisle. Do they see that? Sincerely and honestly? I don't know how I would ever be able to determine if they honestly see that or if they've just conditioned themselves to say that this is what they see.

This probably doesn't rise to the level of being a scissor image, but it's in that direction, not just polarizing due to different views, but having people literally processing the image differently.

Edit: Let's add another interesting piece of optics that I see going viral. I continue to be surprised that my opponents are embracing people that I think make them look maximally weird.

Huh. It looks like the filedelinkerbot removed the official portrait link over night, presumably because it was deleted, which opened a space for Ethical Comics to add their doodle instead. Google suggests that this was the official portrait in question. Perhaps Wiki vandalize or perhaps someone else thought that ZZ's aesthetic isn't all that helpful to their cause.

As far as I understand, you can get better-passing trans people, but that requires "gender-affirming care" for minors, so someone like Zooey Zephyr can avoid developing a masculine face and body. So someone who is offended by both non-passing trans and "chemically castrating children" is basically saying they want to erase the whole idea of modern transness, that the majority of them should suck it up and live their lives according to their biological sex and those who can't and transition should accept being treated as exotic freaks, like someone with facial tattoos or a thousand piercings.

There's a sub on reddit called translater with people who have transitioned later than Zephyr, and many are passable.

'shooped until proven otherwise. I'd assume that people whose self-image depends extraordinarily on altering their appearance and on deceiving themselves will also be very likely to alter their photographs to deceive others.

So someone who is offended by both non-passing trans and "chemically castrating children" is basically saying they want to erase the whole idea of modern transness, that the majority of them should suck it up and live their lives according to their biological sex and those who can't and transition should accept being treated as exotic freaks, like someone with facial tattoos or a thousand piercings.

Yes, I want to erase the whole idea of modern transness. The technology is not sufficiently developed to make it workable in most cases, even if it was a good idea. We should encourage people to feel comfortable with their own bodies instead of fuelling an industry that encourages crude surgical solutions to age-old psychological issues. Let them be tomboys or effeminate males. I've seen plenty of gory photos and admissions from people who've wrecked their lives - this is not an avenue our civilization should pursue until we become much more technically sophisticated.

Without the pressure of imperfect technology better technology may never come. I suppose you'd be fine with it, they aren't.

My advice to any trans-questioning people who I could trust to listen would, of course, be to focus on everything else that troubles them and then see if they're still unhappy with the junk they were born with.

This is a very strange assertion. That photo of Zooey Zephyr looks like someone early on in transition to me. I've seen multiple people like that in queer spaces (adults who started their transition as adults) where 2-3 years later they look more or less like a woman because they've actually been taking hormones long enough (and possibly have gotten some surgery, idk, I've never interrogated any of them on the details of their transition). I guess it's a little surprising to me that she's not closeted or identifying as non-binary at that stage in her transition. (I did some superficial web searching and couldn't find any information on when she came out as trans.)

What do you expect, this is a genuine conundrum. If you assign blockers to every kid with something that looks like dysphoria, you're messing up the ones that would have desisted. If you don't, you run into the passing issue. There isn't a good way out of it, other than improving diagnostics. And even then it won't do anything to help people with late onset dysphoria pass (see Contrapoints, Philosophytube).

Edit: Let's add another interesting piece of optics that I see going viral. I continue to be surprised that my opponents are embracing people that I think make them look maximally weird.

It worked in ancient China for one Zhao Gao (for a time) and it still works today.

Not sure if they’ll go along with his coup, yet powerful enough to have them executed anyway? Curious.

I don’t really have an emotional reaction. Hearing about all of yours is like hearing about celebrity gossip. I’m sure someone feels a burning sense of jealousy and injustice when seeing a picture of Leo DiCaprio’s youngest girlfriend, but that someone is not me.

My intellectual reaction is more along the lines of “yeah, definitely trans.” It’s not great as an iconic propaganda piece. Then again, I’m not sure any state politician could make that setting look good.

I agree. I see a masculine man, with masculine face musculature, with masculine hands. This is one of the counterarguments about the TQ: those who are less masculine, or more “intersex” and androgynous, do not appear more likely to be transgender. It may even be the opposite. Which means all the same hormones that lead to men being just men are also surging through the MTF, causing the same brain changes and so on. So what is the magic physical change that makes an M claim to be F, apart from a feeling? How can this feeling at all he explicated — what does it even mean to feel like a woman except to want to be woman-like? My younger cousin may watch Andrew Tate and decide to act like Andrew Tate, but no one would treat him with the same masculine “stature”. We see that he simply wants to be Andrew Tate, is imitating him. The Left is ordinarily hyper-aware of people wanting to be someone else and criticizes the imposter ruthlessly. Consider the criticism against Cole Sprouse: how dare this non-rugged and non-masculine guy pretend to be a cool, rugged cigarette smoker?

Yes, gay people are being transitioned. Clinicians used to joke at the Tavistock, UK's gender clinic, now closed, that there wouldn't be any gay people left when they had finished...

I'd be interested in hearing people's perspective - how is it not objectively better to have gay people without medical treatment than trans people with?

I don't think Blanchard typology is necessarily scientific and it definitely doesn't cover all cases, but I do think it provides a perspective that is more consistent with observed reality than the "girl born in a man's body" model of transgenderism.

Absolutely, I am cognitively biased, but so many of these men scream playing at being a woman to me, or just not really a woman at all but there for complicated reasons.

Also it's fashionable and can advance your career, just look at all the shameless athletes wanting to shine in glory they were never able to get before. Contrapoints has interesting and thoughtful videos with great production ideas. But even with his creative takedown of Jordan Peterson (everyone loves the JP click train) he wouldn't have been nearly as successful as a regular guy. He captured the zeitgeist perfectly and it's his entire shtick really.

I see a politician doing politics. Neither "brave woman" nor "ridiculous man" seem like apt descriptors to me, just as I wouldn't describe a chess move as "brave" or "ridiculous." It's either a good move or a bad move, and we'll find out which as the game progresses.

That's a more interesting perspective! Do you have any guess on how it plays out? I think part of where I'm coming from is that the aesthetic strikes me as so ridiculous that it's apt to undermine the position being held, with people that are somewhat agnostic on the underlying positions looking at Zephyr and getting the feeling that this isn't really all that consistent with the position that trans women are women. Many people have now hardened their positions (although I suppose those have changed substantially in just a five or ten year period), but I get the impression that there are quite a few fence-sitters that are amenable to humoring people in their desired gender, but might have a tough time with this.

Of course, I see that my own position has crystalized and isn't likely to represent what other people are seeing, which is why I asked in the first place.

Do you have any guess on how it plays out?

I think short term, Zoey probably wins out. They might not win the law suit, but they'll have a victory in PR and their career regardless.

I think long term, the trans issue is probably losing for the left. Trans people are usually(albeit not always) physically ugly, and physical ugliness does not do well in politics. Gay men care a lot more about their aesthetics and actually looking good than a lot of trans women I think. Drag queens do care about their aesthetics though, and I'd expect eventually end up in a position like beauty pageants- not cared about too much by wider society, and the child ones considered creepy.

I don't really know how it will play out, but personally the situation reminds me of Wendy Davis' 2013 filibuster of an abortion ban in the Texas senate. This made her a darling of the Texas Democratic party, rocketing her to the gubernatorial nomination in 2014 where she lost badly to Abbot and faded into obscurity. Given that Montana is a red state, I don't see Zephyr being viable as a statewide candidate, so I would predict a similar type of outcome here. But who knows.

Montana is a red state but they've shown themselves to be more moderate than Texas. Jon Tester still represents them in the Senate and Steve Bullock was the governor until recently, and they legalized recreational marijuana. That being said, these are both moderate to conservative Democrats, and I don't think Zephyr fits that bill. The upshot is that she won't even be able to win a primary there, because when the state party thinks they have a chance of winning, they actually care to have an electable candidate.

I know a lot of men whose forearms and facial bones are less masculine than that.

This is a good insight that is also found in The Last Psychiatrist at times.

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