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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.

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).

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