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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38171 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Animal Farm

Apropos of nothing

Once upon a time there was a farmer named James, exactly where and when he lived isn't important, save to say that his land was both fertile and good for grazing. He and his family owned a flock of sheep, and the proceeds he got from selling their wool at the market was enough to provide for him, his wife Alice, and their son with just a little extra left spare to take good care of the flock.

They weren't poor by any means, James and Alice lived lives of middling comfort, nothing extraordinary but equally content and with all their needs and even some of their wants fulfilled. Truth be told they'd have been quite comfortable were it not for the fact that their son, Poot, was a special child. He was going to turn 16 soon and it showed, he was quite big for his age, both vertically and horizontally, and it was impossible to ignore whenever he entered a room.

Unfortunately while his physical development had been very healthy and robust, mentally he had always struggled. Never extremely badly, Poot was literate enough, and he even had his moments of lucidity, but never for long enough and continuously enough that he could function independently. His parents worried about what would become of the farm when they grew older and who would keep everything running, but that is a story for another day.

Poot though was unconcerned about the future, he lived for the moment. It just wasn't important to him. Poot liked getting his own way with things and he didn't like it when someone else stopped him. Poot also liked spending time with the sheep. It wouldn't be exactly fair to say he liked the sheep, but in them Poot found an outlet for him to act out a world where he got whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it.

The sheep though were enamoured with Poot. For the sheep the world was divided into two types of creatures, those who were like them and those who were like the Other. The sheep had always felt that the Other were better than them in some ways, comparing the way the Other ate and lived to their meager manger but they were loath to admit it. The sheep desired what the Other had, and thought it only fair that they too were allowed to share in it. Poot was most definitely one of the Other, but he had enough sheep like characteristics that they were able to identify with him, and it gave them hope that one day they too could become like the Other.

And so like that Poot and the sheep developed a symbiotic relationship. Whenever Poot was feeling particularly dejected because his parents had forbidden him from doing something he made his way to the manger, where amongst the sheep he was unquestionably king and could do as he wished. Poot had a disruptive streak within him and often he would take his anger out by scattering the hay and upending the water pails in the barn. Even though this meant the sheep lost out on a meal they did not mind it too much for such actions only served to show how Poot was similar to them while still unquestionably being one of the Other. The satisfaction and hope they got from such a display was well worth the lost food. Of course whenever this happened the grownups later had to come in and clean up the mess, but the manger was never in perfect condition anyways and it was better than letting Poot run rampant in the house.

Just as the sheep thought of Poot as the Other they liked the most, the Other they disliked equally as much was V.E.T. . V.E.T. was not one of the family, and unlike the family who the sheep saw on a daily basis, V.E.T. only appeared infrequently. Named after the eponymous letters etched onto his jacket, he was a harbinger of pain and suffering whenever he did show up.

Apart from regularly manhandling the sheep by forcing open their mouths and shining bright lights into their eyes, one of V.E.T.'s favourite pastimes was deliberately poking them with a painful needle one by one in a row. The sheep never could understand what would drive someone to be so cruel as to do this for no benefit at all, for the sheep's lives after this sadistic act by V.E.T. were were very much the same as before he did this. Worst of all sometimes when V.E.T. came he would pick out a particularly old sheep and take it outside with him. That sheep never returned back to the manger. There were terrible rumors about what he did to his unlucky victim but the sheep had never seen conclusive proof, it was as if the sheep V.E.T. had taken simply stopped existing.

As Poot grew older his destructive tendencies became more and more pronounced. Where previously he would only throw around the objects in the barn he had recently taken to punching whatever was right in front of him when he got angry. He had already destroyed three sheep-pens and even splintered one of the boards making up the external wall of the barn when James put his foot down and forbade his son from going to the manger. James decided to make sacrifices to save up enough money and hire a babysitter trained in dealing with special children whenever Poot had one of his outbreaks.

This new state of affairs suited neither Poot nor the sheep very well. Poot because he could no longer physically act out whenever he felt like it, and the sheep because by losing their connection to Poot they had lost their role model, for none of the Other who were not Poot resembled them in any shape of form and the sheep so very desperately wanted to prove to themselves that deep down there was no difference between the Other and them.

This lack of contact proved to be quite disturbing to the sheep. There was much consternation amongst them about how they could continue without access to their role model and many of them were totally perplexed until the tension reached a point where something just had to happen. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key. This lamentation might have all been for naught except that the sounds reached Poot, who upon hearing it remembered the sheep and a desire to go rampage around the manger came back to him.

Very slowly Poot snuck out of the house, his parents did not see him for it was late in the evening and they had already put him to bed. As soon as he entered the barn the sheep were struck with awe, their prayers had been answered and their idol stood before them. Poot himself though wasted no time in starting to wreck everything. He had graduated beyond minor things like upending pails and now went straight to punching a hole in the building's wall. The sheep did not mind this particularly, even though this hole would let in the cold from outside and worsen their living conditions, being close to Poot and his unashamed sheep like behaviours was well worth paying this cost.

Poot might have caused serious damage to the manger were it not for the fact that the ruckus awoke Poot's father who hurried over, worrying about cattle rustlers. Upon seeing that it was Poot James immediately took steps to diffuse the situation, Poot was already larger than him and James wasn't sure he could physically control him on his own any more. Fortunately though he was able to coax Poot to leave the barn by distracting him and sent him off back to bed. After this he went back to check on the barn, the damage Poot had caused was bad but at least it was fixable.

(continued below)

(continued from above)

This episode was enough to placate the sheep for a few days but eventually they started to desire to see Poot amongst them once again. Just like the last time they were not sure about how to do this but this desire only grew stronger until things came to a head. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key. Poot once again heard the sounds and the desire to go smash things up sprouted again, for by now he automatically associated the bleating of sheep with the release he got from breaking stuff. Once again he snuck into the barn and began to go on a rampage. This time he managed to cause even more damage before James discovered what was happening and delicately extracted his son from the situation. James decided to put Poot under constant babysitter supervision to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Poot wasn't the only one who had heard the sheep. Poot's mother, Alice, had always been sensitive to noises and the bleats had given her a bad headache. She wasn't particularly happy about the situation and she had never really liked sheep, if it had been up to her they'd be growing crops instead on their land. Alice took a bunch of painkillers to help, but they had never really worked for her and it took some time before she was back to her normal self.

Of course by this point even the sheep had noticed a trend. Whenever they all bleated together it was followed by Poot making an appearance. Thus the next time they desired to see Poot they knew exactly what to do. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key. Poot heard this sound and the desire to run amok swelled up in him again but under the watchful eye of the babysitter he was not able to sneak out to the barn.

The sheep though continued bleating, they were convinced at every moment that very soon Poot was about to make an entrance, just like all the previous times they had all bleated together. They continued to do this well into the small hours of the night until they were all exhausted and the next day Alice had a very bad headache indeed. The next day the sheep continued their long bleat as soon as they could muster up the energy to do so. From inside the house Poot heard them every second but his babysitter guard was ever vigilant and never gave Poot the opportunity to slip out unseen.

James was concerned that something was wrong with the sheep and naturally wanted to get it fixed as soon as possible. Before long V.E.T. made an appearance at the barn. He wore an expression of confusion and straight away got down to his pastime of manhandling the sheep. The sheep though recognised the intimidation tactic for what it was and continued with their mission. They had had enough of being maltreated, they wanted to see Poot and even the threat of sharp needles from V.E.T. wouldn’t make them stop.

True to form after a short discussion with James V.E.T. did indeed bring out the sharp needles and started poking the sheep with them. However these sharp needles were nothing like any they had ever seen before. This time very soon after a sheep had been poked it suddenly grew very tired until it no longer had any energy to continue with the bleating and fell asleep.

One by one the sheep were supressed by V.E.T. but as this was going on each and every single standing sheep redoubled their efforts, they were sure that if Poot just showed up he would take on and defeat V.E.T. and all things would be good again. At this moment Poot though couldn’t care less. His babysitter had taken him on a nature outing to see butterflys and Poot was too preoccupied with finding and squishing as many caterpillars as he could to have any concerns about the sheep.

After they had all been placated James went and searched the entire property to find the root cause behind the sheep hysteria. He had heard that sheep often cry out when there are predators nearby and wanted to make sure that they were completely safe. He was not able to find anything though, which caused much consternation as he could not think of anything else rational which would have caused the sheep to behave in the way they did.

Hoping that the problem would resolve itself when the sheep came back to he went out to fetch some more clean hay and water for them to make sure they were feeling better after a period in which they had clearly been in high stress. He then went to check on Alice who had recently been feeling very poorly given the incessant noise.

When the sheep woke up they were indeed more placated but eventually they remembered Poot and set about trying to make him show up again. "BAA" went one of the sheep. Another one replied "BAA". A third one joined in "BAA". Very quickly there was a whole cacophony as each sheep joined in on the mass bleating in its own time and key.

Alice, who had been doing her best in the kitchen trying to work with a terrible headache heard the sheep again. Very soon her head started spinning and she collapsed onto the floor.

A week after the events above James and his wife were holding a party. All was quiet around the house and Alice’s headache had pretty much subsided completely. A seed trader, Jacob, and his wife Hilaria (contrary to her name, she was not very funny) were visiting the farm to discuss the economic benefits and pitfalls of growing cotton and some of their neighbours were interested in coming along too.

Poot was upstairs in his room with the babysitter, who had been tasked with making sure he didn’t disturb the guests in any shape or form, as well as making sure he didn’t soil himself (a bad habit Poot had picked up over the last few months as a way of getting back at others when he didn’t get his way). After spending time discussing the technicalities of growing cotton and letting people mingle around a bit it was time for dinner. At the table, mutton was being served.

I got to the part where the mum who lives on a sheep farm got a headache from hearing the sheep bleating and lost my ability to suspend disbelief.

What was the point of this, aside from booo outgroup?

Yeah, that about sums it up.

On a related note I rewatched “Chicken Run” and felt strangely like that movie came back into my life at an opportune moment.

One could argue that was “the good ending” as the memes go and it’s the situation I hope and pray for.

Every day I feel more and more like that’s the endgame worth striving for and the most realistic victory condition for me and mine.

Worst case scenario is as you laid it out.

Best case scenario, the world of my dreams, is a whole-ass fedpost. Another day, perhaps.

Sheep get eaten either way, why not give the farmer's wife a headache before you end up on the dinner table? You're not losing anything by it and your position won't get better if you stay nice and docile while the original farmers keep raising you for meat, or the farm gets sold to the new owners who switch to growing cotton and sell you off for meat.

So...

Poot is Trump. Alice is the people going into histrionics over Trump. VET is an amalgamation of the COVID vaccination and the crackdown following Jan 6. The babysitter is Trump being jailed. The sheep are the Proles. I think the bit about switching to farming cotton at the end refers to some supposed scheme to kill all the proles and replace them with AI? Not sure how Hillary Clinton fits into that.

Switching to farming cotton is probably exporting manufacturing jobs to china or something?

I picked up on the specific analogies but don't really get the point of the allegory. Trump has a lot of low-iq low-skill supporters, sure, so?

“Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?”

Ganz has a long history of these articles. That said, I don’t think any of this is as new a development as he suggests, it’s just people like him are more dedicated to noticing it now.

Ganz’ evidence for some alleged ‘groyper’ takeover of the junior ranks of Republican DC staffers is that Nathan Hochman said that many Trump staffers read BAP. I always think this is funny because BAP himself is in many ways a ‘moderate’, at least in terms of a political program and by the standard of the online far right (see regular ‘psy op’ complaints and various dissident right figures complaining he isn’t antisemitic or homophobic enough). His value is more as a shaman, a spiritual guide. He tells young, conservative men in ooga-booga language not what to do, but that their quest is noble and brave and honorable and above all pure. He’s a motivational speaker more than he is a political thinker.

Look no further than Peter Thiel, arch BAP fan and likely financier, who was most recently in the press because one of his many kept boyfriends committed suicide after spending three years as the host of Pete’s Los Angeles gay orgies with endless numbers of muscular young men whom he pays for company (you have to assume, after seeing this, that he’s a bottom, so the entire dissident right is now funded by a man whose hobby is getting sodomized by ever increasing numbers of muscle hunks). Sure, the SA were a little gay, but this doesn’t really feel like the kind of man who’s scared of a turn toward conservative sexual morality any time soon, which Fuentes and others preach forcefully.

Psychologizing mass movements can be interesting, but part of the reason for the supposed diffusion of rightist ideas is that the only people desperate to work in the modern right, given how low status it is, are these kinds of people. Consider that Nathan Hochman (as far as I can tell, there might be another one), who is probably Jewish himself of course and so probably not a Nazi, graduated from ‘Colorado College’ with a degree in journalism in 2021. Maybe antisemitic affirmative action kept him out of Harvard, but I’d say the young right isn’t sending their best, especially when you consider that his boss is impressively qualified. You work on Tucker, you won’t work in TV again, as shown by the fact that Fox fired rather than reassigned the majority of his writers.

What a radical takeover requires, and Ganz knows this, is an establishment that has utterly given up. That shrugs. That in many cases is happy to welcome in the replacement for the sake of stability and continuity. That in many cases is terrified of the far left. None of these things describe the majority of modern America’s establishment, whether in finance or politics or media or academia. When Bob Iger is so scared of AOC leading the mob to seize Disney headquarters for the revolution that he donates to DeSantis and tells him to do whatever he must to seize power, then the US might be on the verge. But I don’t think we’re all that close.

The fringes of theoretical junior staffing in a hypothetical Trump second administration that will almost certainly never come to pass do not herald a radical transformation of America or its politics. At least not for now. And this is only one of the dissident right’s big problems (the other being that they have no consistent policy program whatsoever).

I agree with this, which is why Gaz just comes across as hysterical. He seems far more convinced of imminent victory of Techno-Imperivm Evropa than anybody in the DR- they should read his blog if they want some white-pills. But you are right that just because there is some influence in memes and slogans and talking points does not at all mean the radicals are getting close to the levers of power. It more likely means the mainstream is trying to integrate elements of the radical right in order to provide an outlet for perspectives that are currently a pipeline to radical thought.

BAP himself strikes me as either having some homosexual inclinations or as enjoying trolling people into thinking that he does.

I mean, he calls himself "Aspiring Nudist Bodybuilder. Free speech and anti-xenoestrogen activist.", his Twitter profile features a buff shirtless guy (perhaps himself) and some kind of ancient Greek/Roman statue, and one of his recent posts reads:

"Squadrons of handsome soldiers are forming a secret society within the Brazilian military. They recognize each other by my book. The days of the democracy and popular government are soon to be over ... replaced by rule of the contest".

Not saying that it means he is into guys but if he isn't, he at least seems to be more comfortable with the idea than probably many of his followers.

It is perhaps inevitable that the actual intelligentsia of the alt-right will tend to have a disproportionate representation of intellectual Jews like Moldbug and of people with unorthodox sexualities, given the disproportionate representation of such people in the ranks of creatives and intellectuals in general. It will not be made up entirely or perhaps even predominantly of the "pure Aryan with five white children" types that /pol/ far-righters dream about.

BAP is almost certainly attracted to men.

actual intelligentsia of the alt-right

There's no alt-right worthy of thinking or worrying about.

You should instead be worrying about the 'sensible center'.

You should instead be worrying about the 'sensible center'.

There's no "center" at all and anyone calling themselves the "sensible center" is almost certainly in lockstep with the media (probably NPR in particular).

There's no "center" at all and anyone calling themselves the "sensible center" is almost certainly in lockstep with the media (probably NPR in particular).

It was a name very successfully used by Blair in his radical remaking of British legislation and thus culture, and it's being enthusiastically advocated by world's no.1 Blair fan, Neema Parvini.

Like with everything else in politics, it doesn't mean what people think it means, and that's by design.

Is that your substack, or did you just find the article interesting? Are you going to respond to any counter arguments if someone addresses any part of this post?

Did anyone archive the post or the link?

Edit: Was it this one?

No, it was this one: https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-browning-of-the-right

The post was just a copy-paste of the article.

I quite like this guy’s posts, I have to say. If they’re bait, they’re good bait that actually refers to a lot of interesting things happening in online dissident right politics, which is a very interesting topic of discussion.

Yeah, we could go back to the previous state of affairs, which was an ever declining number of posts about “my office just implemented a new DEI policy, I’m going to post about how angry it makes me on my favorite forum”, the usual suspects complaining about juice, news articles with the minimal acceptable amount of commentary, or the occasional effortpost about something interesting but only tangentially related to the culture war, but this is an interesting addition.

Seconded. I thought this was a good discussion starter.

shit-stirs in replies, but doesn't address any replies to the shit-stirring. And has a month-old private account. That's always a good sign.

It's the same guy who's been banned numerous times. He posts bait and far right inside baseball while pretending to oppose it.

Here's the last time, which coincidentally is close to the birthday of this present iteration.

You're probably replying to GPT-generated bullshit.

This is what I hate about AI. I don't think we're going to be paperclipped and I don't think we're going to live in post-scarcity riches and luxury. But every second comment now on social media is "Did AI write this?" or "Sounds like AI wrote it" or even "I bet AI wrote this, it's so good!" and "I wish AI would write movie script/comic book/commentary piece".

Were there no humans churning out stupid crap before ChatGPT? Was nobody producing reasonably creative work? If we're no longer going to believe that we are interacting with other humans on the basis "this comment is so terrible it must be AI", then what is the point?

Were there no humans churning out stupid crap before ChatGPT? Was nobody producing reasonably creative work?

It'll be a sad when it turns out that modern human beings won't even be able to pass the Turing test. But my expectations have never been lower.

Virtually every technology out there is always sold on the idea that, it'll be great for humanity on the basis of X, Y and Z; but it's always only ever been marketing garbage. All the 'virtues' and 'wonders' and highfalutin bullshit of these technologies always only ever end up being a footnote and and afterthought to their 'real' uses. Plagiarism, social isolation, degradation of community, and mindless consumerism, to name a few.

Idk, I'm quite fond of refrigerators and dishwashers myself.

It is the new “must be a Russian bot”

Ah... Glad we're still extending endless charity to obvious trolls so that we can slam regulars with the banhammer.

You disagreed with Count’s ban?

Yeah, getting banned for saying "who gives a shit" seems excessive. He wasn't actually aggressive to the other poster.

Edit: wait he was banned for a week?! I thought it was for a day, that is outrageous and I'm not criticising someone who can't respond.

Thus has it ever been ;-)

It's good for the soul.

Yes, everyone you don't like is a secret nazi, all normal politics is nazism, and everyone who disagrees with you is motivated by nothing more or less than sadism.

Or maybe, just maybe, those words don't mean what you think they mean.

He’s quoting an article, as is immediately obvious and as is done here all the time. Sure, quotes would be better, but it’s fine. And the first quarter of the piece is interesting. Every junior staffer in a DeSantis or Trump II administration being a BAP fan is interesting. That said, I would have appreciated some commentary, as is custom.

How is this extremism? His politics essentially are that he wants to avoid massive demographic change that will not only greatly replace his own ethnic group but also causes a low trust and dysfunctional society. Not wanting wage dumping by cheap illegal migrants isn't extremism.

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects is more extreme than not wanting mass migration. Wanting to burn thousands of Libyans alive in firestorms in order to turn Africa's most developed country into a mess run by jihadist groups is extremism. Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism. Labelling every 16+ year old man in Afghanistan a legitimate military target while backing drug cartel government is extremism. Bailing out the banks while people foreclose on their homes is extremism. Going 30 000 000 000 000 dollars in debt largely due to spending more on the military than the next 9 biggest militaries combined when your neighbors are Canada and Mexico is extremism. The patriot act and the incredible power of the NSA is extreme. Pretty much the entirety of mainstream Republican Party positions are extremist positions that ordinary people would have a difficult time supporting if it was explained to them.

Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?

Extremism must surely be defined in relation to the political mainstream, and wanting a massive reduction in immigration partly on grounds of 'demography' is really quite far outside that mainstream.

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects

What birth defects?

the reviewed studies and the available research evidence do not provide a clear increase in birth defects and a clear indication of a possible environmental exposure including depleted uranium

Wanting the politics that Republicans would call far left anti Israel politics if it was applied to Israel isn't right wing extremism just because it is in the US. Why is a wall In Israel not an extremist policy, but a wall separating the Mexican drug war from the US is when tens of thousands of Americans die of fentanyl overdoses every year?

The advocatus diabolus case would probably be something like: "Because what is extremism and what isn't is path-dependent, and the Jews have recent historical form to believe that people are trying to genocide them, whereas white people don't. They're karmically allowed a surfeit of caution, you're not."

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews, but this time they actually were. The fact that systematic extermination hadn't been seen before was insufficient defence against it happening in 1933, and so by analogy it's no defence against it happening to whites in 2023.

I'm not a big fan of the 'holocaust means Israel gets to do settler colonialism' argument but your argument is either trivial or really bad. If your point is "an unprecedented thing happened once, therefore the probability of it happening again is not 0", then sure, but that doesn't tell us anything about what the actualy probability is. If your point is the probability of Jews getting genocided in 1930's Germany is similar to the probability of whites being genocided in 2020's America that's ridiculous. Just the difference in population share should be enough to indicate the situation is wildly different before we even get into the waves of pogroms that swept Eastern Europe during the Russian Revolution and the relative recency of Jewish legal equality in Germany.

But this is fairly easily defeated by pointing out that in 1933 no-one had recently tried to genocide the Jews

Not fully, but Jews had been conditioned over the past 100 years to the idea that their neighbors could turn on them at any moment in smaller-scale violence (i.e., "only" 5-10 dead, and maybe a dozen women raped plus various property destruction, sub-lethal beatings, etc.) which occasionally escalated in turn into something much worse. Like, imagine if the 1992 LA anti-Korean riots kept occurring in LA every 5 years or so, with fatalities each time. Or if BLM went out and rampaged through white suburbs every couple years. Under those conditions, it seems pretty obvious why they would have been a mite twitchy.

The better argument is that identity politics shouldn't stop at race. "People like me" were very much subject to murder and internment, more recently and in more places than the Jews, the rich the educated and Christians were killed or imprisoned in Cambodia, China, Russia. That those people were "like me" in our social class and means of subsistence rather than in some nebulous genetic sense doesn't alter the impact.

Wanting to fire 750 000 rounds containing depleted uranium over Iraq causing thousands of children to get birth defects is more extreme than not wanting mass migration.

Not understanding the difference between terminal goals and instrumental goals is more extreme than doing so.

Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism.

I heard that the Ukrainians have killed more than two thousand Russians without trial. If you're at war with someone (declared or not) that's sort of the point.

This is just an anti-Republican Gish Gallop.

Not understanding the difference between terminal goals and instrumental goals is more extreme than doing so.

Claiming to advocate for the war while being against the results of the war is absurd. Did they advocate for invading Iraq with water guns? Advocating for these wars was advocating for extreme violence and the death of vast numbers of innocent people. Did they actively speak out against torturing people, bombing their homes and committing numerous war crimes? Did they demand that the US army stopped defending drug cartels in Afghanistan when the price of heroin fell through the floor?

If you're at war with someone (declared or not) that's sort of the point.

Exactly, advocating for war is advocating tremendous tragedy. Advocating for unprovoked wars in the middle east is extreme.

I took the so-called extremist position, after 9/11 the obvious solution was that people living in a cave in Afghanistan shouldn't be allowed to enter western countries.

Advocating for bombing the middle east for 20 years, spending trillions of dollars of borrowed money and flooding the west with migrants was apparently the non extremist position.

Claiming to advocate for the war while being against the results of the war is absurd.

"Not being against" and "wanting to" aren't the same thing.

Advocating for bombing the middle east for 20 years, spending trillions of dollars of borrowed money and flooding the west with migrants was apparently the non extremist position.

"Killing a thousand people without trial by targeted drone strikes is extremism" implies that you are objecting because of the number of kills, not because of the expense or migrants. In fact, you listed the expense separately.

Are you under the impression that the only thing Fuentes, BAP, etc endorse is an end to mass immigration and ‘the wall’? They make fun of the wall all the time.

In like manner, Fascist politics give the feeling of “momentum,” “going there” and “moving towards,” an exciting sense of fatal direction.

I question the foundational assumptions which undergird this argument. Marxist and Communist and even liberal and neoliberal ideologies, which have varying claims of "the future is ours!" and "we will win in the future!" and "the world becomes more liberal over time!" have all made the rounds.

Every ideology and every movement makes claims of inevitability. Sure, Landianism also has a tinge of being darkly enlightened. "Our god, our religion, our ideology is better than YOUR ideology" is a key ingredient of every system of constructing national, social, individual, political identity.

Society will progress. Society will regress. Time moves on, and yet there is an idealized past being attempted to move back to, or an idealized future. There is no ideology that exists which doesn't also make meaningful claims about the future and its own inevitability. Latestage capitalism evokes this idea that capitalism will fall over because it's in the last stages of metastization. And yet. And yet it still hasn't fallen over.

The right tends to look back to a lost golden age that never truly existed, while the left tends to look to a future that never ends up the way they expect it to.

I think every civilization exists at some point in a lifecycle. Ibn Khaldun and Oswald Spengler thought as much. Investors have become interested in the economic shifts that play a role in it. Peter Turchin is trying to synthesize something that he thinks may be able to extract patterns out of the mess of history. Toynbee likely would've disagreed.

History is replete with examples of societies who were on top of the world at some point, representing economic and social and technological preeminence; only for the historical wrecking ball to come by and place them on the scrap heap of history. The same will happen in the US at some point, inevitably. I think we're playing a role in driving ourselves off that cliff. Incidentally, people have speculated (and I agree with them) that climate change will reduce the US to a regional power at best, that will no longer be able to sustain its status as the world's sole superpower.

Incidentally, people have speculated (and I agree with them) that climate change will reduce the US to a regional power at best, that will no longer be able to sustain its status as the world's sole superpower.

How? The northern hemisphere is going to get a boost in crop yields.

Studies that separate out climate change from other factors affecting crop yields have shown that yields of some crops (e.g., maize and wheat) in many lower-latitude regions have been affected negatively by observed climate changes, while in many higher-latitude regions, yields of some crops (e.g., maize, wheat, and sugar beets) have been affected positively over recent decades. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/

The US will likely continue on its trajectory, losing power relative to the rest of the world, but not because of climate change.

I don't know how long your time horizon is, but I think it's just categorically wrong. In fact, it's one of the reasons why I moved out of California to a better area, primarily as a way to hedge against climate risk. Take it from Charlie Hall who pioneered the concept of EROEI. Also recommend the work of the world's leading heterodox economist, Steve Keen and his work on energy. In particular, listen to the episode "Economics and thermodynamics."

The world trends on energy, resource usage and ecological degradation I think tend to support the conclusion.

I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.

The world trends on energy, resource usage and ecological degradation I think tend to support the conclusion.

You mean trends like this:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maize-production?country=~OWID_WRL

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-output-dollars

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production

Are your beliefs falsifiable?

I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.

I mean I don't see any issues with the ROI concept itself. It's a bit of a tautology, but at least it gives us something quantitative that could be updated with new or better data.

In the case of agricultural production, the counterargument to your figures would be that recent increases in crop yields and the green revolution are dependent on artificial fertilizer produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which in turn is dependent on fossil fuel energy that has a decreasing ROI over time. This belief could be falsified by evidence that new sources of oil and natural gas (e.g. shale, tar sands, etc.) do not in fact have a lower ROI than older ones, that nuclear or renewable energy technologies are scalable to the same extent with similar or better returns, or that there are cheaper alternative sources of fertilizer.

The supposedly degradating EROEI has been going on for at least two centuries, and it has failed to affect the continuous growth of world pop and gdp/cap . An englishman in the 19th century may have had access to close-by and better-quality coal (anthracite) and oil , but if he put it in his car, babbage's computer or lamp, he would get far less out of it than we do. In other words, once mined, the return on his energy was terrible, hence why he was so much poorer than we are. As time advances, the mining eroei decrease (getting the energy) is more than compensated by the non-mining efficiency increase (spending the energy). So total EROEI (covering the entire process) is actually increasing.

I'll have to examine your links further, I'm not confident to make a comment about them without looking at it in greater detail. Yes, my beliefs are falsifiable; I'm committed to them quite firmly however, because I've never seen them addressed.

When you linked to the IPCC above for instance, that's something Keen explicitly takes to task, as he knows many of the people behind the data (and in his view, notoriously 'bad' data) and shows how wildly off the mark it is. For additional information on that, I'd recommend you listen to "The mineral supply crisis that's rarely talked about," and "Nordaus Climate Model Debunked," in the MEGA link above. Nate Hagens also has some good data that I think runs contrary to your notion.

Until I see some solid replies to the contrary that don't sideline or ignore the above, I think I'm fairly secure and on firm ground where I stand. The only problem is, a lot of the people on the forefront of the data tend to ignore it; so it never directly gets addressed.

Can you give me something shorter than a book?

My links are just the straight line of constantly increasing food production through time. This is concrete, things you hold in your hand and put in your mouth. Not models and speculation. You say there's erosion, ecological degradation, but it has not seriously affected us . Every year people warn of peak oil and limited resources, and every year the line creeps upwards as always.

Am I understanding you right, you think the IPCC is too optimistic? Because I think it's too pessimistic.

I'll listen to one podcast/youtube vid. Which do you pick?

Eh, were you able to open the podcast link I posted earlier? I was edging you more toward that than the book (which I was just sourcing, more than anything else):

https://mega.nz/folder/MYlFwYpC#ZHmrbskzPgKHq9BGuWjvFg

Let me know if you have any issues opening the folder. It's directly to my cloud account. Some people have said they have issues (like if they're at work), most have no problems.

I know what you're essentially pointing to, and the long-term trends as it relates to those points are something Keen addresses. I can't pick out the various points via transcript and haven't written them down myself in concrete detail. Podcast wise, the three episodes I recommend are:

  1. The mineral supply crisis that's rarely talked about

  2. Economics and thermodynamics

  3. Nordaus Climate Model Debunked

Pick whichever one seems more to your liking. But that's what I'd recommend at a first pass/superficial level. You'll forgive me, but I want to look into your links in further detail. Until then, I have nothing else to add on that side of things.

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The US will likely continue on its trajectory, losing power relative to the rest of the world, but not because of climate change.

The US has a disadvantage in some ways because it has a lot of stationary capital invested. For a concrete example, take coastal warehouses in New Orleans: those are not prime pieces of real estate. Moving those (or, more realistically, building new ones) costs more here than it would in a developing country. And many of the most productive parts of the US lie in coastal areas. Even e.g. the US's high level of current agricultural productivity faces similar challenges; although anthropogenic CO2 will have neutral to net positive effects on theoretical agricultural production, the investments we made in infrastructure for it were made over the past hundred years, not the next hundred years. New infrastructure will face a heavy regulatory burden: imagine a piece of once marginal land that rapidly becomes more potentially productive. Developing it will be more expensive or even impossible compared to a century ago.

Countries that are less hidebound will be able to respond more quickly to changing times. Even if large parts of Bangladesh end up underwater and thousands of Bangladeshi low-skilled workers end up dead, it's easy enough to throw up new shantytowns and factories in unaffected areas.

I thought the progressive line was that the third world would bear most of the cost and that was unfair. The total sea level rise since industrialization is at most a foot (30cm). I don't see this overwhelming the capacity of a country like the US. Likewise, changing the crops and the location of the field will hardly prove a challenge.

Well, I'm not pushing the progressive line here.

But, to state it, the progressive line is that there will be more loss of life in developing countries. This is likely true; in the West, most deaths will be related to vulnerable populations dying off in heat waves, but that will be more than counteracted by fewer people dying due to the cold (which comprise ~90% of temperature related deaths in the West). However, loss of life doesn't mean much economically or in terms of geostrategic power. Bangladesh isn't hurting for unskilled labor, and most of the people who would die aren't especially economically productive.

Changing crops and field locations isn't a game of Civilization; modern agriculture is sophisticated and is integrated with existing infrastructure, policy regimes, and local labor pools. Suppose an area gets the potential for high agricultural productivity, but to actually achieve that productivity needs water rights that are contested by local urban areas and environmentalists. This isn't at all insurmountable, but it's a friction that less developed and sclerotic places don't have to face.

It's not going to overwhelm the capacity of the United States. It will just be a headwind compared to developing countries. Climate resiliency is good, but it also means making it so we can actually respond effectively to climactic changes as opposed to obstinately demanding clearly unrealistic stasis.

Suppose an area gets the potential for high agricultural productivity, but to actually achieve that productivity needs water rights that are contested by local urban areas and environmentalists.

So it's less the environment that's the problem, and more the environmentalists. My point exactly. Their proposed cures, such as their obstructionism and multiple percent of gdp green packages, will do more harm than the actual disease.

I heard a quote awhile ago that was something like "be careful telling people they are Nazis, because one day they might believe you."

If every young white man who has a valid criticisms of the prevailing cultural dogma is pigeonholed into that classification, the author isn't doing himself any favors. It's true that Dissident Right talking points are increasingly being embraced by the mainstream conservative movement. Is that due to sadism, or is it maybe because the DR is getting at something real, and the perspective can no longer be ignored by the conservative talking heads?

Here's Matt Walsh a couple weeks ago:

Well, I'm concerned too. And my concern is this, that if you still have any confusion about what these diversity initiatives actually are, well, this should clear it up. Diversity absolutely means anti-white. That's what it means. All diversity initiatives are anti-white initiatives. Anytime you hear about any kind of diversity initiative anywhere, whether it's in government, in corporations, in any institution at all, it is an anti-white initiative. Diversity is an anti-white conspiracy. And you can clip that and cut it and post it on Twitter because I know you will, because that's what it is. And if you ever doubted it, well, here you go.

It would have been unthinkable for someone like Matt Walsh to say this even a few years ago. Matt isn't saying this because he's sadistic, he's saying it because the prevailing cultural dogma is actually pretty hostile to white people. Gaslighting people with "If you believe that you're a Nazi" has greatly contributed to the Nazi memes, I can guarantee you that.

But ultimately, the core of fascist subjectivity is the indulgence of sadistic feelings.

This is so uncharitable that it bears no resemblance to reality. Let's take a look at one of the many various compilation videos of Hitler's speeches that gets clicks from e-fascists. The fascist subjectivity here is not the indulgence of sadistic feelings. It invokes:

  • Feelings of revolutionary triumph from an undesirable status quo

  • Sense of community

  • Strong leader with a charismatic devotion to the people

  • Proposing the nation as inherited from a people

The author has no understanding whatsoever for why this propaganda is compelling to those people, and why there might be a lack of these elements in the present culture that does indeed explain Trump and the growing influence of the Dissident Right. But it's not due to sadism, it's due to very real deficiencies in the culture that do not provide for these human needs, so they are sought in heterodox and taboo spaces.

Edit: OP deleted the post, which was just a copy + paste of this article with no additional commentary.

Well, in many ways you and Ganz make the same argument (at least until he starts psychologizing, of course). Ganz actually agrees with you that, say, Elon discussing Soros memes is world-historically significant. He’d probably highlight the same Matt Walsh quote. The thing that he’s apparently noticing is the thing you point out regularly in this thread in your top-level posts and comments.

Yes I agree with Ganz on a lot of what he it saying, but at some point he has to recognize that the gaslighting isn't going to work and acknowledge that people who gravitate towards right-wing radical politics kind of have a point, and they aren't there to indulge some latent demand for inner sadism. The mainstream starting to adopt radical talking points and slogans is more acknowledgment that there are salient points to their underlying perspective that the mainstream can no longer entirely ignore.

Honestly, Ganz seems like he could be a cheerleader of fascism, he identifies some real undercurrents and then just denounces them as racist or antisemitic like they are self-evidently wrong. I have to believe when he goes on about something like "Reactionary Modernism" and says:

Biological racism and technics occupy a similar structural position as something “real:” “blood and the machine are seen as concrete counter-principles to the abstract. The positive emphasis on "nature," on blood, the soil, concrete labor, and Gemeinschaft, can go easily hand in hand with the glorification of technology and industrial capital.”

You know some people are going "sounds kind of based", but Ganz seems to think that if he can tie something to fascist thought he has proven it to be wrong.

but at some point he has to recognize that the gaslighting isn't going to work

Why? Or what? Finish the thought. The real world isn't a logic proof, and people are really good at clinging on to irrational and incorrect beliefs out sheer tribal affiliation, or contrarianism, etc.

Why? Or what? Finish the thought.

This is my first exposure to Ganz, but he seems to have penchant for making fascism seem way cooler and more credible than the best propaganda efforts of the radical right. Self-deception can go far, but only so much. Is he going to say Matt Walsh is a fascist now indulging in his inner sadism, and the Daily Wire is primed to join the techno-fascist takeover to constitute the Silicon Reich? Maybe he will, but at some point he seems like a smart person and I think he will recognize his model of the world breaking down such that he has to acknowledge some sort of substance to the radical right beyond sadism and fatalism. It's not a high bar.

But in the meantime, his articles I've read so far are enjoyable, and he does have a good finger on the pulse of some esoteric undercurrents among the Radical Right, but he seems resistant to interpreting them rationally.

Is he going to say Matt Walsh is a fascist now indulging in his inner sadism, and the Daily Wire is primed to join the techno-fascist takeover to constitute the Silicon Reich?

I mean, this is not that uncommon an opinion on the activist left, so yes probably? Moreover, "fascist" just means "evil." Orwell recognized this back in the 40's, when OG fascism was still technically alive. So there's no real mental model to the term that can be confronted with contrary detail.

It would have been unthinkable for someone like Matt Walsh to say this even a few years ago. Matt isn't saying this because he's sadistic, he's saying it because the prevailing cultural dogma is actually pretty hostile to white people.

Not for the first time I realise that all of those people I mocked back when I was a good little unthinking left-wing redditor for saying "anti-racist is code for anti-white" were, well, exactly right. I just didn't have the piece of the puzzle that there are people who believe that all white people bear the original sin stain of racism.

I heard a quote awhile ago that was something like "be careful telling people they are Nazis, because one day they might believe you."

Part of the problem is that "Nazi, fascist, far-right extremist, white supremacist" have been so over-used that people are now reacting "If that makes me a Nazi, okay I'm a Nazi" instead of falling over themselves trying to deny it or dropping whatever argument they had been making.

Trump is a fascist. DeSantis is a fascist. I'm a fascist, you're a fascist, they're a fascist. Everybody except me and the six people who agree with me in lockstep are fascists, and as soon as one of them demurs even slightly from my list of acceptable right-think, they'll be a fascist too.

Either that, or they're "reactionaries", another favorite left-wing snarl word.

That view's now become common in our political parlance, as a result of Democrats and leftists alike having their heads this deep in their own ass. I've never encountered any political opposition that can currently and coherently articulate a right-wing viewpoint, without satirizing or sneering at it. I'll admit I've got positions on things that could be found at home within Fascist ideology, but to them, there isn't even a normal right-wing. There's only the 'sane and normal' leftism that claims to travel the middle of the road, and right-wing, neofascist extremism, the moment you even venture an inch to the right of that.

Define "coherently"

Are we talking "internally consistant" or are we talking about "abiding by the norms of inductive reason and dialectical materialism" because if the latter it's lack of coherency is arguably a feature rather than a bug.

I recall having had conversations with genuine ultra progressive leftists who I’m reasonably sure have changed their gender since then, who admitted I made fascism sound reasonable even if they didn’t disagree with it. They’re clearly capable of interfacing with right wing ideas even if they don’t understand what fascism is, they just don’t. I think most of that is filter bubble.

They're capable of interfacing with the 'form' it takes, but not the actual fascist political organs themselves. Yet they get funny in the head when I point out to them that it works the other way around, too. The CCP for instance, is highly Democratic 'in form', if you accept the Democratic principle that government is justified by the consent of those they govern. Plenty of people are happy and content with the lifestyle improvements that the CCP has delivered for them. Now a leftist may reply back, that well even if they didn't approve, they couldn't do away the CCP, despite wanting to vote them out of office. And I could always reply back, that the same is true of the 'so-called' Democracy we have here in the US. If a leftist is content with the illusion of our effective two-party duopoly, then I suppose that'll suffice for them. But that's a pretty superficial political endorsement. By that standard, Cuba could've become a Democracy overnight, if the choices were between Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. But I tend to think you've got Democracy only in name, and not in actuality. Yes, Democracy is 'also' an autonomous political system, but that doesn't mean authoritarian systems can't be 'highly' Democratic.

Leftists are all but fully content with the near full on, totalitarian cultural stranglehold they've got over the country. The largest states in the US are effectively the trendsetters for the direction the rest of the country takes, after themselves. But I have no illusions that they actually believe any of their idealized principles. They're equally prejudiced asswipes in the opposite direction. And that's fair enough. As a right-winger, I'm playing that same game. But I'm not peddling bullshit in the process. I'm not someone for instance that would go around saying bodily autonomy is important, and then violate that all but 'sacred' principle, the moment COVID mandates get brought up. If you're a hypocritical POS, own it out in the open.

I’d better go read all this fascist literature to understand who I am

Part of the problem is that "Nazi, fascist, far-right extremist, white supremacist" have been so over-used that people are now reacting "If that makes me a Nazi, okay I'm a Nazi" instead of falling over themselves trying to deny it or dropping whatever argument they had been making.

It's weird how nobody seems to recognize this, from either side. The right keeps diluting "socialism", and then the left calls them on it... and proceeds to dilute "fascism".

Ironically, the right only showcases their own ignorance when they call someone like Joe Biden a socialist. It's one of the most insane and asinine things I've ever heard.

People say this shit as self evidently true but really why is it self evident? Biden doesn’t believe in government ownership of the means of production but he seems pretty into the government control of the means of production along with re distributing wealth (albeit to his tribe). The amount of money the federal government spends would make many socialist governments blush.

He isn’t a 1960s socialist but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a socialist.

I'm extremely confused on what you're getting at (or even talking about?).

It's pretty clear. Biden has enough socialist policies that calling him a socialist is not "showcasing his own ignorance".

What socialist policies does Joe Biden promulgate? Last I checked, he isn't trying to democratize Walmart, trying to make it look more like the Mondragon Corporation.

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Yeah but the amount of people who'd outwardly self-identify as Socialist/Marxist influenced is far greater than the amount of people who'd outwardly self-identify as fascist.

Yes, because the professed ideals of socialism (universal brotherhood of man, equality, freedom from toil and force and brute necessity, creation of riches and plenty for all, etc.) are pretty consistent with the professed goals of western liberal civilization.

Thus, it's easy to convert people to a crude form of socialist-identity just by saying "don't you want sick people to be treated by doctors? Don't you want people not to starve? Don't you want people not to have to work 16-hour days in horrible coal mines?" and yadda-yadda-ing and handwaving (or even just ignoring) the question of how we get from here to there.

The overarching goal for many jews is to shape society in a way that benefits jews. Low social cohesion, diversity, and multiculturalism makes jews one group among many that don't stick out. Nihilistic consumerism and the idea that nothing really matters or is important beyond ourselves makes it easier for a jewish subgroup to increase their power and reduces their risk of being considered outsiders. All forms of group oriented thinking are labled as bad. Jews don't want to live in a homogenous culture with strong norms, traditions and a strong sense of identity.

This plan has backfired somewhat as the jewish community seems to be getting high on their own supply with plummeting birth rates among liberal jews and much of the deconstructivist philosophy being swallowed by jews themselves. Jews are engaging in extreme dysgenics with their least intelligent and probably overall least genetically healthy elements breeding at a high rate while lawyers on Manhattan have below South Korean birth rates.

Jews are engaging in extreme dysgenics with their least intelligent and probably overall least genetically healthy elements breeding at a high rate while lawyers on Manhattan have below South Korean birth rates.

Is this true? I wouldn’t think Orthodox Jews are necessarily lower IQ than reform Jews. They have lower secular achievement, sure, but that’s because they don’t care/are religiously forbidden from it. Using that to claim Orthodox Jews are generally lower IQ than reform Jews is like claiming Mormons are generally worse in luck than non-Mormons because they’re underrepresented among gambling winners despite being closer than average to Las Vegas.

I thought the IQ difference was more from the fact that the Jews that have 5 or 10 kids are not Ashkenazi, and are more likely to be sephardic and so on?

I was under the impression that Orthodox Jews were more likely to be ashkenazi?

I'm not sure there's a paradox here so much as there are Jews on both sides of the issue... Conservative and religious Jewish advocacy for an increase in fertility is no different than Mormon advocacy; incidently, the latter rate is higher than the former, and even secular Jews in Israel are below replacement level. This isn't evidence of some "hypocrisy" or scheming among Jews.

The key point is that religion and culture manipulates breeding behavior towards eugenic or dysgenic ends. Is the Brahmin being a hypocrite when he comes to America and joins the chorus of anti-racism and denounces eugenic-minded thinking for white people? It's his religion! There is, in fact, nothing hypocritical or paradoxical about preaching eugenics for your people and preaching dysgenics for your outgroup. If you are in competition with other tribes, this is going to be a powerful strategy, particularly if you can convince your outgroup that dysgenic behavior is the realization of a universal moral good, and eugenic behavior is the ultimate evil. It's ultimately tribalistic, not conspiratorial or hypocritical or paradoxical.

Religion, culture, and eugenics are one. This fact is understood foremost by the Jews, who have carried this knowledge through the millennia within their myths. Take the Book of Genesis: Jacob, the Patriarch of the Jewish people, swindles a herd of sheep from his father-in-law by peeling the bark off the tree. Seeing the striped tree, the white and black sheep interbreed and Jacob the Deceiver wins the flock of speckled sheep. This myth portrays ancient knowledge of the use of media for eugenic purposes, and it's important to recognize here that sheep are symbolic for people in biblical myth.

Of course Judaism is not the only religion that transmits an ancient knowledge of eugenics through the medium of religion, the Hindu caste system could be regarded as one of the most successful eugenic programs in human history, with most Brahmin to this day possessing the Aryan haplogroup R1a1 that has been inherited unbroken from the paternal line. It would be inaccurate to call this a conspiracy or eugenics with the veneer of religion, the religion is eugenics and eugenics is the religion.

There are of course some instances of outright hypocrisy, like LessWrong advocates for polygenic embryo screening falling over themselves trying to explain why it's not eugenics:

In my view, the term “eugenics” should not be used to describe embryo screening. In most people’s minds “eugenics” conjures images of government-sponsored sterilization efforts, genocide, and racist pseudoscience. I understand the technical definition is just “good for genes”, but this is not what comes to mind for most people when they hear this word.

Even worse, most of the horrible things done in the name of “eugenics” in the past were in fact not eugenic at all! The entire Nazi theory of genes was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how genes worked. They believed that non-aryan peoples were “contaminating” the “pure aryan bloodline”, and that only by purging those who were unpure could they make a perfect master race. Which is of course not just a morally repugnant theory, but also wrong.

If you want to have a productive conversation, I would suggest using the term “epilogenics” to describe non-coercive means of improving genes that are in line with what we expect those affected would want. There are of course still some concerns with epilogenics (increasing inequality for example), but they are decidedly NOT the same concerns that people have about eugenics.

Here is a case where we see a sheer hypocrisy, but I don't even know if the author of this LW article is Jewish- although I suspect many Jews will make a similar argument as they use polygenic embryo screening. The more profound behavior we see in this article is the familiar use of the Holocaust to denounce eugenic thinking for white people, which is actually the crux of the issue.

With the understanding that religion, culture, and eugenics are inseparable, then we must relate the genetic trajectory of the nation and Europe to its sacred myths, and there is no myth more sacred today than the Holocaust. Understanding the Holocaust as the body of myth that formulates the prevailing civic religion, the issue becomes much deeper than merely a question of hypocrisy. It's a religion that denounces European race consciousness as the ultimate evil and all behaviors against European race consciousness as the ultimate good. It's the anti-caste system, where the civic religion is used to deconstruct and destroy rather than moralize a race consciousness that would be required for eugenic-minded behavior and culture.

The article you link traces the use of this civic religion to derail eugenic-minded thinking within the Academy and culture writ large. There is a full knowledge and recognition of where this breeding program is headed, best illustrated by Lise Funderburg's National Geographic feature, The Changing Face of America: We've become a country where race is no longer so black or white.

Certainly, race still matters in this country, despite claims that the election of Barack Obama heralded a post-racial world. We may be a pluralist nation by 2060, when the Census Bureau predicts that non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority. But head counts don’t guarantee opportunity or wipe out the legacy of Japanese-American internment camps or Jim Crow laws. Whites, on average, have twice the income and six times the wealth of blacks and Hispanics, and young black men are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. Racial bias still figures into incarceration rates, health outcomes, and national news: A recent Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family prompted a barrage of negative responses, including claims of white genocide and calls for “DIEversity.”

...

When people ask Celeste Seda, 26, what she is, she likes to let them guess before she explains her Dominican-Korean background. She points out that even then she has revealed only a fraction of her identity, which includes a Long Island childhood, a Puerto Rican adoptive family, an African American sister, and a nascent acting career. The attention she gets for her unusual looks can be both flattering and exhausting. “It’s a gift and a curse,” Seda says.

It’s also, for the rest of us, an opportunity. If we can’t slot people into familiar categories, perhaps we’ll be forced to reconsider existing definitions of race and identity, presumptions about who is us and who is them. Perhaps we’ll all end up less parsimonious about who we feel connected to as we increasingly come across people like Seda, whose faces seem to speak that resounding line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

There's a recognition, celebration, that this is what Americans will look like in 2050, and this is absolutely downstream of the prevailing cultural and religio-political myth that defines the boundaries of our ways of thinking about race and eugenics. This is far more important than any individual-level hypocrisy, and after all pointing out a hypocrisy can be cathartic but it never motivates a rethinking of things and doesn't reach the crux of the issue in any case.

Yeah, that was the article I saw and I realized the interviewee was a different person working on a similar project:

I saw an Israeli television campaign that showed faces on trees and bus stops, like missing children ads. A voice-over said, “Have you seen these people? Fifty percent of young Jewish people outside of Israel marry non-Jews. We are losing them.”

It's interesting to contrast the description of that television campaign with the campaigns we see in the United States, which would be a good example of what the article you linked is identifying.

Also, as @2rafa has pointed out before, a lot of Jews and Jewish NGOs, including George Soros, advocate for increased non-Jewish immigration to Israel.

The "both-sidesing" is so tiresome, we are allowed to take stock of the net impact while recognizing there is a distribution of advocacy and influence among Jews. The net impact is that we see Jewish influence hostile to European race consciousness and heavily affine to Jewish race consciousness. Even assuming an exogamy rate of 50% in the United States, given the small proportion of Jews among the population in America that implies an enormous endogamous influence from Jewish identity.

Not necessarily, I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be resolved if they all just loved and married each-other and became one peoples. The Jewish religion is passed matrilineally, so there could be TV campaigns in Israel promoting Jewish women to take Palestinian men and I wouldn't have a principled opposition to that.

Upvoted this in appreciation of the cleverness of the reply - I'm a big fan of dirty rhetorical tricks like that.

This is absurd, I am not evading the question. One of the best aspects of the American project is the formation of a pan-European ethnic identity, which has entailed the mixing of distinguishable European groups into a "white" identity. That is a political project, and ethnogenesis, that I support.

I don't support the political project of Sweden becoming Middle Eastern. I doubt Jews would support the project of racially integrating with the Palestinians.

I answered your question: I am not against it in principle, but I am concerned with the political motives and outcomes of that social organization, which everyone always has been throughout all of human history, and this concern took the form of religion.

My tongue-in-cheek answer was meant to demonstrate the hostility of encouraging endogamy for your ingroup and exogamy for your outgroup. Seems pretty hostile, doesn't it? It's only tongue-in-cheek, I have an unreciprocated respect for Jewish ethnic identity and I wouldn't seriously demand that they race-mix with the Palestinians to smooth racial tension.

I'm confused why you think the caste system is eugenic. Indians, like Jews, suffer from a surfeit of genetic diseases from their excessive endogamy norms. And the extreme endogamy norms seem to be inherited from the Harappans the Aryans conquered not the Aryans themselves. You don't see anything like it from the Iranian branch of the Aryans.

You also seem to be confusing eugenics with kin/group selection in your argument. Unless you think the only genes that are 'good' are your own despite how objectively inferior they might be on other metrics.

Propensity for genetic disease is only one dimension of fitness for some objective like maintaining a ruling class or group survival as a diaspora with strong loyalties to an ancient, foreign religion. There are tradeoffs, but propensity for genetic disease isn't strictly inferior to other traits like IQ or religious zealousness in realizing these group-level objectives.

I'm not sure where the attribution of the caste system to the Harappans comes from, if you have anything to read about that I would be interested. The earliest description of the caste system comes from the Sanskrit (Aryan language) Rigveda. All indications are that the caste system was created to preserve the genes of a conquering ruling class in the framework of a religion with inherited priestly function.

You don't see anything like it from the Iranian branch of the Aryans.

Persia was conquered by the Arab Muslim jihad- and jihad, it should be noted, is another stark example of group-level genetic strategy as religion along with Hinduism and Judaism. The Jihad is the reason for the ethnic composition of Iran today, and a quick search shows < 9% frequency of R1a in Iran compared to a 57% frequency among Rajasthan Brahmin.

So we see persistence of a caste system where Aryan genes have been preserved, and no caste system where they were conquered. All Indo-European civilizations have had some form of a caste system, with the Phratry in Ancient Greece, which also contained elements of inherited priestly function, attributed to Indo-European origins. And of course the Patrician class in ancient Rome emerged with the Italian conquest by the Indo-European derived peoples who became the founders of Rome. This is not to deny by any means that the caste system and Hinduism in India is heavily influenced by contributions from all its indigenous populations, it's to say that this is a common a feature of Indo-European civilizations, and we don't see it where those genes no longer exist.

Edit: As an aside, here's a really interesting comparison of Sanskrit with Lithuanian that puts the cultural similarity in perspective:

Sanskrit: Kas tvam asi? Asmi svapnas tava tamase nakte. Agniṃ dadau te śradi tada viśpatir devas tvam asi.

Lithuanian: Kas tu esi? Esmi sapnas tavo tamsioje naktyje. Ugnį daviau tau širdy, tada viešpatis dievas tu esi.

English: Who are you? A dream in your dark night. I gave you the fire in your heart, so you are god our lord.

And

Sanskrit: Kas tava sūnus?

Lithuanian: Kas tavo sūnus?

English: Who is your son?

You are confusing Varna with Jati as caste. Other Indo-Europeans had a Varna like tripartite division between warriors, priests and commoners, but there wasn't the extreme level of endogamy that you find in India that has let upper caste Indians remain genetically extinct from lower caste ones. You don't see that in other Indo-European societies, but you do see it in the Dravidians.

I'm glad to mention Greece, because in Mycenean Greece there was absolutely no correlation between steppe ancestry and social status. The gryffin warrior a steppe style chariot riding warrior aristocrat with his ostentatious grave was found to have no steppe ancestry at all. Despite them clearly having close contact with the proto-Indo-Iranian peoples before they entered Greece. The Basque have a higher percent of the Indo-European r1b then there fellow Iberians. The non-Indo-European Etruscans were genetically identical to their Itallic neighbors.

Edit: I'm also a little confused about your obsession with Y-haplogroups. We have lots of studies on autosomal DNA. Eastern Iranians are more Aryan than Brahmins and a quarter of Iranian citizens are Turks.

I doubt anyone truely cares about the actual proportion of various ancestries. What they care about is ethnogenesis, how their people came to be.

For this purpose, Y and Mt DNA shed light in some aspects that autosomal DNA only cannot, such as the type of intermingling that gave birth to your ethnic group, power dynamics, etc.

For example almost all Latin Americans have y-haplogroups denoting European paternal descent but their Mt DNA shows near complete Native American ancestry for Maternal descent.

Hence we can infer that Latin Americans of today originate from European men and Native American women.

What about European maternal ancestry? The conquistadors were almost all men.

Native American paternal ancestry? You can guess.

This pattern of ancestry turns up in many other populations.

Most modern Europeans attribute their ethnogenesis to such asymmetric gender mixing.

There is actually pretty strong evidence that the original proto-Indo-European speakers were from Armenia/Northwest Iran and the new population that formed the late proto-Indo-European in Ukraine that became the modern Europeans was actually mostly from the y-haplogroup the EHG who lived there before, and the mitochondrial DNA is mostly from the original proto-Indo-Europeans from Armenia. Because, ancient DNA from Hittites in Anatolia had absolutely no EHG ancestry and certainly no y-haplogroups from any EHG. Of course, it's controversial to people like the starter of this thread who cares so much about y-haplogroups.

I'm an Anglo, but our culture was spread by proto-Germanic people with the haplogroup I1, a non-Indo-European haplogroup, and we are mostly not I1 now. We are mostly the Bell Beaker R1b, even in Germany and Denmark we are mostly R1b, with lots of R1a. If you look at a map of what the most common haplogroup Germanic speaking people have its a pastiche of all 3. I'm not ashamed of any of my ancestors and I think this whole thing is ridiculous.

No, why would I? My ancestors were from an amalgamation of very divergent groups in relatively recent history. My cousins are descended partly from similarly divergent groups. Unless we hope to drive the various non-white racial groups that exist in the USA to extinction, I see no reason to oppose interracial marriage. That we should support eugenics in general, then sure, but I'm not advocating for miscegenation laws, genocide, or sterilization.

The level of endogamy in India is more likely due to natural pressures of a small ruling class in a highly diverse, increasingly urbanized continent. There are high levels of endogamy among Afrikaners, Québécois, and ruling elite like the Habsburg family. There is ample precedent. Are you saying that the level of endogamy among the Brahmin caste is not motivated by perpetuating the ancestry of a ruling class, it's motivated coincidentally by an unrelated indigenous tradition? I don't quite understand the point you are making here.

because in Mycenean Greece there was absolutely no correlation between steppe ancestry and social status.

That's a strong statement based on a small number of samples... The societal organizations which are most relevant to our discussion, the phratry, the phyle appeared to emerge in the 1st century B.C. Asserting that these organizations were unrelated to steppe ancestry is premature and most likely incorrect given the likely indo-european origin of these social organizations. Granted there is a lack of ancient DNA from Greece and the small number of samples we do have from Mycenean Greeks shows lower steppe ancestry than other Southern Europeans, and in particular their northern Macedonian neighbors. And it's worth pointing out Alexander the Great was Macedonian.

The non-Indo-European Etruscans were genetically identical to their Itallic neighbors.

My understanding is that Etruscans derived slightly over 50% from Bell Beaker-derived peoples who migrated there during the Bronze Age. Of course the Bell Beakers did not have pure steppe ancestry, but there is still a significant base of Steppe ancestry in Italy before Roman conquest of the peninsula. The Romans who conquered the Etruscans and became ruling class almost certainly had greater Bell Beaker admixture than the Etruscans and therefore more steppe ancestry. The Etruscans did not speak an Indo-European language so the Roman conquerors certainly had more steppe ancestry as IE speakers.

The linked study found the Etruscans derived [their] entire ancestry from other European populations such as the earlier Bell Beaker group from northern Italy and Iron Age populations from southern Europe so the Roman empire is absolutely inseparable from IE ancestry and culture:

This analysis demonstrated around 25% ancestry from such a distal steppe-related source, which reached around 50% when comparative populations were reduced to those more proximate in time and space than the Yamnaya, e.g., central European Bell Beakers

Of course as Rome conquered foreign nations (with less IE ancestry), we again see the emergence of a caste system correlated with European steppe ancestry in a sprawling empire. Notably, Rome never conquered Germania and was itself conquered by foreign barbarians with more steppe ancestry than the increasingly-admixed Roman ruling class.

Eastern Iranians are more Aryan than Brahmins

I'm aware that Y-haplogroups highly correlate with urban centers in Iran like Tehran, and therefore social and political class, but I'm not aware of Eastern Iranians having more European steppe ancestry than Brahmins. I'll take a look later.

The level of endogamy in India is more likely due to natural pressures of a small ruling class in a highly diverse, increasingly urbanized continent. There are high levels of endogamy among Afrikaners, Québécois, and ruling elite like the Habsburg family. There is ample precedent. Are you saying that the level of endogamy among the Brahmin caste is not motivated by perpetuating the ancestry of a ruling class, it's motivated coincidentally by an unrelated indigenous tradition? I don't quite understand the point you are making here.

The Dalits are the most endogamous populations in India not the Brahmins. European aristocrats don't have anything close to the levels of endogamy as seen in Indian Jatis lower and high caste. Afrikaners also have rates of endogamy far higher than Indian Jatis with Afrikaners having about 5% non-European ancestry, while Indian Jatis have endogamy rates of less than 1%.

My understanding is that Etruscans derived slightly over 50% from Bell Beaker-derived peoples who migrated there during the Bronze Age. Of course the Bell Beakers did not have pure steppe ancestry, but there is still a significant base of Steppe ancestry in Italy before Roman conquest of the peninsula. The Romans who conquered the Etruscans and became ruling class almost certainly had greater Bell Beaker admixture than the Etruscans and therefore more steppe ancestry. The Etruscans did not speak an Indo-European language so the Roman conquerors certainly had more steppe ancestry as IE speakers.

Yeah they did initially, but by the time of the Roman Republic they were identical that's my point. No one was practicing eugenics or enough endogamy to erase the genetic distinction between class and ethnic groups. Even very small amounts of exogamy will erase genetic differences in the long run. Just look at the breeder's equation!

I get the feeling you don't understand how extreme endogamy has to be to maintain genetic differences over long periods of time. Population geneticists were absolutely startled how extreme the genetic distances between Indian Jatis living in the same area were. You don't see that in Europe or other places colonized by Indo-Europeans. You don't see it anywhere except places where there have been recent migrations. It just doesn't exist.

I'm aware that Y-haplogroups highly correlate with urban centers in Iran like Tehran, and therefore social and political class, but I'm not aware of Eastern Iranians having more European steppe ancestry than Brahmins. I'll take a look later.

How can you not tell you can see it on their faces. Genetically the Eastern and Western Iranians are very different (for western Eurasian populations that share an ethnicity). I'm still not sure what your obsession with Y-haplogroups is. Why aren't we talking about autosomal DNA if we are talking about eugenics and ancestry?

Again, can you explain your point with respect to my claim? Are you claiming the caste system in India has non-Indo European origins? Is it not an example of a genetic strategy as a religion as I have said? Hinduism is the expression of the unique combination of genes and environment on the continent, I wouldn't expect it to be identical to all IE civilizations. But caste endogamy is absolutely a common feature in IE civilization and that feature in Indian civilization has IE origins.

The Roman Republic certainly experienced genetic change as it expanded, and the prominence of the Patrician class waned as the empire decayed (isn't there a lesson there if we contrast Rome with the longevity of Indian civilization?) But we still see an IE civilization with a caste system that correlated with steppe ancestry, conquering nations with lower steppe ancestry until it itself was conquered by barbarians with greater steppe ancestry.

I get the feeling you don't understand how extreme endogamy has to be to maintain genetic differences over long periods of time.

According to David Reich, "the population that contributed genetic material to South Asia was (roughly) 60% Yamnaya [my note: European steppe ancestry], ~30% European farmer-like ancestry".

Even with the particularly endogamous features of Indian civilization, modern day Northern Europeans bear far greater genetic similarity to the bronze age migrants, including the Aryans, than any peoples in India. I would likewise say the Bell Beaker-derived Patricians of Rome bore far greater genetic similarity to these Aryans than any modern population in India, with that similarity decaying as the Roman Empire integrated other nations into civic society.

Endogamy is a greater concern in IE civilizations with greater diversity including: South Africa, Latin America, Colonial America, the British Empire. Granted none of those are like the Hindu caste system, and those are all examples of post-Christianization European civilizations which would again support my argument for religious changes being synonymous with changes in genetic strategy (the Catholic church outlawing cousin marriage is significant here). Still, those civilizations had caste system with high levels of endogamy including in America, where the colonials resisted mixing with the natives.

How can you not tell you can see it on their faces.

Well we have more precise ways for understanding genetic similarities. I would be interested to know the Yamnayan ancestry for different sub-populations in Iran, including the sub-populations you claim are more genetically similar to the Aryans than the Brahmin. I don't necessarily doubt it I'm just not aware of that data. I see this guy on Reddit, that's significant Yamnaya ancestry but not that close to the Brahmin.

Again, can you explain your point with respect to my claim? Are you claiming the caste system in India has non-Indo European origins? Is it not an example of a genetic strategy as a religion as I have said? Hinduism is the expression of the unique combination of genes and environment on the continent, I wouldn't expect it to be identical to all IE civilizations. But caste endogamy is absolutely a common feature in IE civilization and that feature in Indian civilization has IE origins.

No it is not, not anywhere close to the extent of Indian society. And the non-Indo-European Dravidians have this endogamy too. I have gave you examples of Indo-European exogamy like the non-Indo-European Etruscans who were found to be identical to the Romans next to them even before they were assimilated to a Roman identity.

The Bell Beakers who both groups were half assimilated were almost 50% EEF. Far more than the Corded Ware Culture people like the Aryans who were only 20-30%. The Latins had nothing like the endogamy in India. Over 2000 years they became identical to their non-Indo-European neighbors. In 3500 years the Brahmins still have more steppe and Harappan ancestry. The Shudras in South India (who are denied, categorically, upper caste status by the Northern Indian Brahmins) have higher steppe and Harappan ancestry than the Dalits.

There is no evidence the Patrician class was more Indo-European in ancestry than the lower classes. Even the Etruscans had similar rates of R1b to the Romans. The Basque who are more EEF shifted than fellow Iberians have higher rates of R1b. The extremely steppe Swedish are modally the non-steppe I1 haplogroup.

Endogamy is a greater concern in IE civilizations with greater diversity including: South Africa, Latin America, Colonial America, the British Empire. Granted none of those are like the Hindu caste system, and those are all examples of post-Christianization European civilizations which would again support my argument for religious changes being synonymous with changes in genetic strategy (the Catholic church outlawing cousin marriage is significant here). Still, those civilizations had caste system with high levels of endogamy including in America, where the colonials resisted mixing with the natives.

The colonials resisted a little bit, but look at them now. They are not quite thoroughly mixed, but they are making great progress, and that is with large amounts of immigration from Europe and even the Middle East and Asia! It isn't panmixia, but you don't need that to remove genetic distinctions between populations. You only need a little.

Finally:

Here's a link on the Indian caste system being Harappan.

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/india-genetics/

Here's a line on Eastern Iranian genetics.

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/12/descendants-of-ancient-european-fair.html

And here, note Brahmins are less than 30% Sintashta like ancestry even in the North-West.

https://razib.substack.com/p/among-afghans-jewel-of-the-dragon

Only the Jats and Rors who are clearly descended of ancient Eastern Iranian peoples, who invaded later, have more steppe ancestry, despite being considered low-caste Shudras.

More comments

Wow, those Jews and their International Zionist Conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, who could be up to them?

I'm not Jewish and I think eugenics is bonkers and evil. The Nazis just took it to the logical extreme, but before the war there were Eugenics Societies popping up everywhere happily planning the betterment of the human race (by letting the superior stock breed and discouraging the undesirables).

If you think the 'forty years of unscrupulous Jewish conspiracy to stop the goyim from practicing eugenics to improve themselves' is bad, be glad Francis Galton never got his way to make eugenics a common social practice. In order to marry and have kids, you (a gentleman) would need to be working towards your Certificate of Fitness since you were a child, being assessed and scored by your teachers and others all the way up to and through university, until finally you got a high enough score to be a potential spouse.

Meanwhile the young ladies would be advised by their families, and the prospect of an uneugenic marriage would be regarded with the same scorn and detestation as incest. Forget falling in love, that's romantic nonsense the young are confused by, sensible mothers and the neighbourhood nosey parkers would make sure Mabel marries Philip and not Terrance.

I am not one bit surprised Jewish people would think eugenics a discredited notion and work against it.

But here was me thinking Jewish eugenics was "make sure before marriage that you're not carrying the genes for the various bad syndromes that Jewish populations are at high risk of due to centuries of in-breeding in a small genetic pool", but no! It is all a secret plot to reap the benefits of the Super Master Smart Race for themselves and keep it from us Gentiles!

The plot must be working, I feel I have lost 10 IQ points reading the post above.

It is terribly weak.

Meanwhile the young ladies would be advised by their families, and the prospect of an uneugenic marriage would be regarded with the same scorn and detestation as incest. Forget falling in love, that's romantic nonsense the young are confused by,

A common fallacy I've seen is to compare one historical ideology/cultural practice with modern life, and use that comparison as a point against the historical version.

But a much more fair comparison would be the one Galton made, which compares his proposed eugenic society to real life 1860-1870 England:

"The best form of civilization in respect to the improvement of the race, would be one in which society was not costly; where incomes were chiefly derived from professional sources, and not much through inheritance; where every lad had a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal help of the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in his early youth; where marriage was held in as high honor as in ancient Jewish times;" - Galton 1869

Note the alternative Galton is comparing to is marriages based on inherited title and income. Do you believe that real world alternative in 1869 was better than Galton's proposal?

The Nazis just took it to the logical extreme,

No. The Nazis did their own thing that was not particularly related to actual eugenic proposals. Since you invoke Galton, here's the rest of the quote above:

"where the pride of race was encouraged (of course I do not refer to the nonsensical sentiment of the present day, that goes under that name); where the weak could find a welcome and a refuge in celibate monasteries or sisterhoods, and lastly, where the better sort of emigrants and refugees from other lands were invited and welcomed, and their descendants naturalized." - Galton, 1869

Galton was generally a friend to Anglo-Jewry and viewed them favorably, as anyone who actually read him would realize: https://galton.org/essays/1900-1911/galton-1910-jewish-chronicle-eugenics.pdf

I'm not Jewish and I think eugenics is bonkers and evil.

You believe the concept itself is evil, or are you just quibbling about the particular method?

Embryo selection- bad too ?

How about cloning exceptional people. Bad ? Why?

How about encouraging women for whom pregnancy is uncomplicated to have a 3rd, 4th child via IVF, based on some very good sperm ? Why is that 'evil' ?

Everyone is pro eugenics. Just ask them if a brother and sister should be allowed to copulate and bear children

The taboo against consanguineous relationships has existed for thousands of years without leading to piles of skulls.

Yes but why should we need such archaic laws and taboos? The taboos against homosexuals also existed for thousands of years without skulls. So meh

Also eugenics has been around for thousands of years in other forms. Baby looks kinda weird? Throw it off a cliff or leave it exposed to the wilderness. Meh.

That doesn't change his point. His point was that it's still eugenics. Regardless of whatever the reason may be. In a rudimentary sense, we're 'all' involved in some form of eugenic practice. If I undergo the subconscious analysis of looking at a woman, and I decide the size of her hips make her a good candidate for having my children, that's a basic eugenic practice. People are always afraid of discussing it at the easiest level though, because they're afraid that you're going to trade on that basic agreement over terms, as a way to push for large-scale, sociopolitical policies that justify someone's comprehensive program of eugenics.

That doesn't change his point. His point was that it's still eugenics.

A point responded to a century ago. (Part I, Chapter 2, paragraph three.)

I read it, but I'm not sure how that's an adequate answer to what I've said, but I suppose it's a reply. Unless there's something I'm missing.

Did you know that thinking incest is icky is just dumb prejudice based on nothing? I've had to trawl through some of the Father of Eugenics, Francis Galton's, essays and hoo boy. His point there is that there is just social prejudice against incest, without really a factual basis (brother and sister banging and having kids is no big deal, it only gets to be a big deal if you keep inbreeding) and so in the same way, harnessing the same social forces, we can make people frown on dysgenic marriages and treat them like incest!

The Nazis may have given eugenics a black eye, but all the attitudes were baked in from the start. Oooh, they didn't know about genetics? They got the idea of contaminating the pure bloodline wrong? Well back in the day the Eugenics enthusiasts had the same attitudes: all those incapables and lower class types breeding and having children and smothering the good bloodlines.

Galton loved him some statistics and worked out an entire classification system of "good to bad" for humans re: eugenic stock, and backed it up with his stats.

As it will be useful henceforth to distinguish these classes, I have used the capital or large letters R, S, T, U, V, for those above mediocrity and corresponding italic or small letters, r, s, t, u, v, for those below mediocrity, r being the counterpart of R, s of S, and so on.

The one point I will give Galton is that he was more interested in encouraging the 'good stock' to breed than trammeling the rights of the 'inferior stock', though he did think they should be encouraged not to marry etc. A lot more of the Eugenics types were way too interested in working out exactly what desert island they could lock all the undesirables up on so they would be removed from the gene pool:

Many who are familiar with the habits of these people do not hesitate to say that it would be an economy and a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated under merciful surveillance and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring. It would abolish a source of suffering and misery to a future generation, and would cause no unwarrantable hardship in this.

This is how you find the few really high-quality candidates for marriage and offspring:

Diplomas.—It will be remembered that Mr. Booth’s classification did not help us beyond classes higher than S in civic worth. If a strong and widely felt desire should arise to discover young men whose position was of the V, W or X order, there would not be much difficulty in doing so. Let us imagine, for a moment, what might be done in any great University, where the students are in continual competition in studies, in athletics, or in public meetings, and where their characters are publicly known to associates and to tutors. Before attempting to make a selection, acceptable definitions of civic worth would have to be made in alternative terms, for there are many forms of civic worth. The number of men of the V, W or X classes whom the University was qualified to contribute annually must also be ascertained. As was said, the proportion in the general population of the V class to the remainder is as 1 to 300, and that of the W class as 1 in 3000. But students are a somewhat selected body because the cleverest youths, in a scholastic sense, usually find their way to Universities. A considerably high level, both intellectually and physically, would be required as a qualification for candidature. The limited number who had not been automatically weeded away by this condition might be submitted in some appropriate way to the independent votes of fellow-students on the one hand, and of tutors on the other, whose ideals of character and merit necessarily differ. This ordeal would reduce the possible winners to a very small number, out of which an independent committee might be trusted to make the ultimate selection. They would be guided by personal interviews. They would take into consideration all favourable points in the family histories of the candidates, giving appropriate hereditary weight to each. Probably they would agree to pass over unfavourable points, unless they were notorious and flagrant, owing to the great difficulty of ascertaining the real truth about them. Ample experience in making selections has been acquired even by scientific societies, most of which work well, including perhaps the award of their medals, which the fortunate recipients at least are tempted to consider judicious. The opportunities for selecting women in this way are unfortunately fewer, owing to the smaller number of female students between whom comparisons might be made on equal terms. In the selection of women, when nothing is known of their athletic proficiency, it would be especially necessary to pass a high and careful medical examination ; and as their personal qualities do not usually admit of being tested so thoroughly as those of men, it would be necessary to lay all the more stress on hereditary family qualities, including those of fertility and prepotency.

Jewish communists and Jewish fascists

…Jewish libertarians, Jewish Objectivists, Jewish capitalists, Jewish socialists, Jewish eugenicists, Jewish Muslims, Jewish Christians, Jewish atheists, Jewish Ukrainian Nazis, Jewish CEOs, Jewish actors, Jewish news editors, Jewish bloggers, Jewish poor people on welfare, Jewish homeless drug addicts.

Jews are so fully integrated into mainstream culture in every respect that they’re in every profession, creed, and political group. To assign any collectiveness to Jews as a whole at this point is as fallacious as making the same list with Irish-descended or German-descended people. That’s my answer to “the Jewish Question.”

Surely you know that this is a lazy approach to the question. In fact, it seems tailor-made to be lazy and to require the least amount of thought possible. “I find this question yucky, so I will throw my hands up and refuse to contemplate it with any depth whatsoever.” You can’t seriously believe that percentages and probabilities mean nothing at all. You don’t actually think that the existence of a teeny-tiny handful of Jewish converts to Islam, or an infinitesimally small number of Jewish bums and street criminals, means that we cannot draw any useful conclusions about likelihoods and general tendencies. I trust that you’re smart enough to see why this is an absurd approach, in the same way that the existence of a tiny and statistically-insignificant number of female muggers and MMA fighters does not in any sense render us unable to draw reliable conclusions about the differences between men and women.

I am not disputing that; I am disputing that the existence of Jewish bums and “Jewish Muslims” disallows us from forming any useful generalizations about patterns involving Jews as an ethnic group, which is the claim that Duplex made. Certainly there were prominent Jews in most major post-Enlightenment European/Anglosphere philosophical movements, and I agree that this should give the hardcore “all leftism is the Jews’ fault” antisemites serious pause. This does not mean that Jews are exactly as undifferentiated and lacking in specific/prefictable qualities as German-Americans.

I think the worry is about creating generalizations out of red-herrings and a pattern of circumstantial evidence. I think many Jews are becoming increasingly differentiated. The percentages you brought up are certainly meaningful, but I think they're meaningful in the same sense that they're meaningful for most other populations you can find out there; namely of a very mundane and uninteresting kind. It's even inherent in the Reform tradition.

I would argue this is mostly coincidental on the personal level — the exogamy rate of Jews and especially in academia is a great disproof of any conspiracy. Now, on the financial level? On the financial level it is indeed possible that leading ethnic-nationalistic Jews (religious zionists) would fund both pro-Jewish eugenics and be against eugenics applied to other people at large. Consider the case of Efrat

Senator Chuck Schumer, a noted pro-choice champion who has used the issue of abortion to secure his New York Senate, attended a 30th anniversary gala for Efrat. Schumer has been lauded by Planned Parenthood who called him a “hero,” with “a 100% pro-choice, pro-family planning voting record,” but in 2007 Schumer put his pro-choice position aside and joined his anti-abortion foes at the celebration. (Schumer’s office was contacted, but did not provide a comment for this story.)

American Friends of Efrat, the U.S.-based fundraising arm of Efrat (no relation to the settlement of the same name), is an Israeli anti-abortion group with hundreds of volunteers that counsel Jewish women against abortion and provide support for the first year of the child’s life.

According to IRS 990 tax reports, the American Friends of Efrat pulls from mainstream foundations including matching donations from Deutsche Bank, The Goldman Sachs Foundation and the Prudential Foundation. But the heftiest sums come from the Jewish community. Despite the fact that 89% of American Jews support abortion rights, the Federation Foundation of Greater Philadelphia sent the group $100,000 in 2004 and 2006, while the Jewish Community Foundation of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles gave C.R.I.B. just over $5,000 in 2007 and $10,000 in 2008. In addition, the Madav IX Foundation, a charitable organization funded by Jewish family foundations but administered by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, gave the C.R.I.B. program $10,000 in 2008. The Madav IX Foundation shares the same Ohio address of the Bennet and Donna Yanowitz Family Foundation that gave the C.R.I.B. program $2,000 in 2004 and $1,000 in 2007.

”Israel is currently fighting a demographic war for her survival. As we go to print Israel’s borders are in jeopardy. The Arab birthright is about double the Jewish birthrate. General Uzi Dayan speaking as the Director for the Council of National security announced: ‘Demographic projections forecast an Arab majority in Israel by the year 2020 less than 15 years from now”

It’s really important we understand what anti-semitism ought to mean. Anti-semitism in the form of hating the Old Testament religion or hating a race or hating a language is always and forever bad. But what do you call someone who says, “I feel uncomfortable with a fiercely in-group ethno nationalist network that has high level donors who only fund their own bloodline”? Whatever you call this latter thing, it is utterly justified IMO. The problem is that there’s an element of Judaism that is literally just that; they believe that their race and DNA is infinitely more important than any belief or practice, and they believe their existence on earth is to secure the Jewish People and a future for Jewish children. Should such a group be free from criticism? Only if we want the world to devolve into tribal infighting in 200 years.

they believe their existence on earth is to secure the Jewish People and a future for Jewish children

Nice veiled reference there, very subtly done, ha ha you are so clever to link Fascism and Zionism!

Look, if we hadn't had a war within (just about) living memory over a damn good attempt to wipe out the Jewish People and Jewish children, you'd have a point. But given that the extirpation of European Jewry (and any where else they could manage to conquer) was indeed an aim of the Nazi party, there is some grounds for forbearance on "let's encourage our people to have babies".

I mean, haven't we already had plenty of posts and comments on here about "so the fertility rate in the West is dropping like a stone, how do we encourage women to have babies"? Should such commentary be free from criticism, given that they want to ensure white birth rate goes up?

If there exist Jewish extremists who are primarily driven toward increasing their own bloodline and racial power, such that they support abortion for “goys” but desire births for Jews, that interest is at odds with the interests of everyone else. Again, it will lead to extreme conflict in the future. Jews would be the first ones to criticize White Americans if they did what some of them do.

This is what I was going to say as well. It looks at only one side of a historical antagonism. The other side being the accusation that Jews have a covert interest securing their future, at the expense of the societies that hosted their population over time. Whatever one believes about that is beside the point.

Senator Chuck Schumer, a noted pro-choice champion who has used the issue of abortion to secure his New York Senate, attended a 30th anniversary gala for Efrat. Schumer has been lauded by Planned Parenthood who called him a “hero,” with “a 100% pro-choice, pro-family planning voting record,” but in 2007 Schumer put his pro-choice position aside and joined his anti-abortion foes at the celebration. (Schumer’s office was contacted, but did not provide a comment for this story.)

Well, on the other hand...

Efrat has never protested outside a gynecological clinic, nor has it sought to restrict Israel’s fairly liberal abortion laws. Last month, the organization supported a proposal to allow women to undergo abortions without first appearing before a state committee, as the law currently requires.

Efrat’s president, Eli Schussheim, describes himself as pro-choice, a position he adopts more from pragmatism rather than principle.

It seems more like the kind of charity that supports single mothers in many religions and in secular society, which exist all over the world. I suppose it encourages women not to abort their children, but this isn't the major objection the left has with pro-life activists (the major objection is that pro-life activists believe abortion itself should be criminalized).

Well yeah, Efrat wants to help Jews, not “citizens of the nation Israel”. Israel is 74% Jewish. What Efrat does is influence Jewish women to have their children, and they’ve done this with 80k women so far. Given their advertising in my OP, they very specifically don’t care at all if Muslims have abortions, and in fact they probably support it! Again, this is obvious from their advertising. Remember that Israel is the state that subtly conspired to sterilize Ethiopian migrants with birth control shots. So… you’ve proven my point?

in fact they probably support it! Again, this is obvious from their advertising

Is it too much to ask to provide a link to the evidence that you claim supports what is a rather inflammatory claim?

Is it too much for you to read my post? Read my post and click the link.

Israel is currently fighting a demographic war for her survival […] The Arab birthright is about double the Jewish birthrate. General Uzi Dayan speaking as the Director for the Council of National security announced: ‘Demographic projections forecast an Arab majority in Israel by the year 2020 less than 15 years from now.’

The group that catastrophizes Muslims having babies, which fear-mongers this fact in order to fund Jewish women having babies (the group is directed toward Jewish women exclusively), yet is pro choice on the national stage? Yes, I can say they probably support Muslims having abortion, but you’re free to disagree if you find a reason to.

There is no link in the post I replied to.

It’s in my OP reply but also here’s link, the text source is in the image of the article and also pasted in the article

That quote isn’t from Efrat, it’s from an Israeli nationalist who supports it.

The quote is from the organization Friends of Efrat which is the org that Schumer among others is shown supporting

The point is that this organization doesn’t map onto the pro-life/pro-choice debate in American politics. The original post suggested hypocrisy among Jewish progressives like Chuck Schumer by suggesting they supported the pro-life position in Israel but the pro-choice one in America. That’s manifestly not true, because ‘Efrat’ is in fact pro-choice by American standards; actual pro-life activism has a relatively small role in the Israeli debate.

If the allegation is merely that Chuck Schumer once attended an event by an organization that used a quote by a Jewish nationalist Israeli general in an ad, that seems pretty weak.

Kaplan writing in the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies? This reeks of historical revisionism. Israel sterilizing Ethiopian women is a well-attested event in history.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-to-put-the-ethiopian-israeli-birth-control-controversy-to-rest

What these people are failing to note is that the source of the controversy is not one mistaken mischaracterization by one news source—the source of the controversy is the women themselves. As I wrote in January, many, many Ethiopian-Israeli women report being threatened or lied to about the Depo-Provera injections: “We didn’t want it,” one woman is quoted as saying in the February 28 article. “We refused and objected. We said we didn’t want to.” (More such comments can be seen here, here and here).

Thus, while accuracy is always important in reporting and Haaretz was right to issue the correction, what we really have here is a classic case of vulnerable citizens complaining of governmental abuse, their government denying that abuse, and a group of observers privileging the government’s version of events over that of the people complaining. It is precisely these kinds of stories that we pay journalists to cover; that’s why we call journalism the fourth estate.

https://www.salon.com/2013/01/28/israel_admits_ethiopian_jewish_immigrants_were_given_birth_control_shots/

It’s not surprising, but still abhorrent, that Israel would try to deny this atrocity.

is there proof in these links? Seems like all they can say is that they are "allegations"? Is there hard proof?

Weren't those Ethiopian Jews? That doesn't fit your narrative very well.

The Jewishness of Ethiopian Jews is disputed by some in the israeli religious authorities, IIRC.

I offer no judgement as to whether that’s because Ethiopian Jews are black or because they lack a credible claim to jewishness.

Perhaps, but these were immigrants who were admitted precisely because the government recognized them as Jewish, were they not?

Sixth-generation American secular Jewish academics with a fertility rate of 0.9 who volunteer for 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and whose conception of Judaism is essentially identical to progressive social justice (much as is the Christianity of the average modern Episcopalian/Anglican priest) and hardcore Israeli religious Zionists intent on colonizing the West Bank and having 5+ children, who couldn't give less of a shit about American politics are two very different groups of people. "Isn't it curious that some of group argue for this, while others argue for that" can literally be applied to any large group of people, including Americans, women, software engineers and so on. It isn't that there are no examples of blatant hypocrisy, because there are, but that this is a universal part of the human condition. See all the senior white men in every big corporation who are happy to remain in power and pay themselves large amounts of money, but who kick the ladder away from any young white guys who would replace them by ensuring the junior staff are fully diverse. They're not replacing themselves with a black CEO.

the issue ought to be considered by posing the following questions:

In my opinion, the more salient question is something like this:

Did Jewish overrepresentation in 19th and 20th century intellectual movements substantially alter the trajectory of Western liberalism / progressivism, or merely accelerate it?

Jews did not, after all, invent the enlightenment (ironically some 20th century Jewish chauvinists overstated Spinoza’s importance to try to suggest they did, but this was ahistorical). Hegel, from whom Marx derived his ideas, was not Jewish. Nor were almost all of the early egalitarians and liberals of the Scottish and French enlightenments who established the worldview that would captivate America’s progressive founders, which would write the constitution, which would lead perhaps inexorably to the present day.

The contention of most Jewish reactionaries, including Moldbug and myself, is that while Ashkenazi Jews embraced liberal ideas with great zeal after the Haskalah (lacking the context of the Christian ideas from which they emerged, and to some extent excited about the emancipatory possibilities they offered) for relatively obvious reasons, they did not invent these ideas, they did not invent their popularity, and they probably did not substantially alter their trajectory.

This places these Jewish reactionaries in an older Catholic and occasionally even Protestant reactionary tradition that, though at times antisemitic, did not place Jews at the center of its ‘axis of evil’, seeing Jewish overrepresentation among communists and progressives merely as a consequence, rather than a cause, of wider sociopolitical developments. Churchill, for example, shared this view to some extent. French Catholic reactionaries did and sometimes still do consider Jews as merely a junior coalition partner of secularists, Freemasons, Protestants and others. It’s also very different to the other view on the dissident right, popularized by MacDonald and others, that Jewishness is ‘central’ to the entire development of modernity and that liberalism was basically fine before around 1920 or 1950 or some arbitrary point in the 20th century.

I don’t think it’s “hard”, but it is perhaps harder than it would have been had various late-twentieth-and-early-twenty-first century political movements not occurred.

This reminds me of Halsey English's (Jewish) debate with Nick Fuentes (Catholic) and they argue over this point. Halsey did make the correct observation that Jews were originally excluded from the Protestant banking practices during earlier American history. So as a result, they formed their own, out of which you got the large investment banks like Goldman Sachs. And then people came along later and complained that Goldman Sachs was overwhelmingly Jewish. Well that's why they originally founded Goldman Sachs, because nobody would give them jobs doing anything else.

It's hard to say, because nobody is coming out saying "Thank God for the woke, I am so sick of all the competition!" Instead they all couch it in terms of "Yeah the future is female, diversity is our strength! God I can't believe I've been such a dick but the scales have dropped from my eyes now! And even though I have no intention of giving up my job, it is both my honour and privilege to further the cause of social justice by never hiring another stale pale male. Some might call me a hero, and to that I say you are welcome minorities!"

Sixth-generation American secular Jewish academics with a fertility rate of 0.9 who volunteer for 'Jewish Voice for Peace' and whose conception of Judaism is essentially identical to progressive social justice (much as is the Christianity of the average modern Episcopalian/Anglican priest) and hardcore Israeli religious Zionists intent on colonizing the West Bank and having 5+ children, who couldn't give less of a shit about American politics are two very different groups of people

The overwhelming majority of Jews in elite positions are Zionists. Most may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists. These JVP types are fringe elements. It's a fact that many Jews in the US preach liberal ideology to the goyim while heavily supporting an ethno-nationalist creed for Israel.

In a sense, this is a higher-IQ version of German Turks who vote for the left in the Germany but support Erdogan when voting from abroad. In my view, the true underlying values of a community can only be revealed when they are in the majority. There are too many ethnic self-interest incentives when you're a minority.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in elite positions are Zionists. Most may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists.

Yes, in the same way that a lot of influential Boston "irish" were pro-IRA, completely independently from (and often with little knowledge of) the actual conditions on the ground in Ulster. Or in the way that it took Ghandi and the scattering of subcontinental elites across the British empire to really create the modern idea of a pan-regional, pan-linguistic, and pan-religious "Indian" nation-state. Or the way it took American "blacks" who'd been in the U.S. for generations to invent "Pan-Africanism".

The politics of a diaspora community are very different from, and motivated by very different concerns than, the politics of the "mother country."

In Israel, most secular Ashkenazim from the same background as American Jewry vote for progressive parties whose plan for government is a coalition with the Arab parties. There are very few hardcore religious Zionists in the US because almost definitionally ethnats seek to move to their ethnic homeland.

The overwhelming majority of Jews in liberal elite positions are Zionists. They may identify as liberal Zionists - if one can be a "liberal ethno-nationalist" - but they are Zionists.

The overwhelming majority of liberal Jews poll as liking Israel and consider it important to ‘Jewishness’ in a vague way. They have no particular opinion on Israeli immigration policy, no particular opinion on the Israeli government (although many poll as being hostile to ethnats like Bibi) and no opinion on what percentage of the Israeli population Jews should make up. Most have no idea what the demographics of Israel even are. Most American Jews have never been to Israel. In 2021, Pew Found only 25% of American Jews polled as “very attached” to Israel. (A further 30% polled as “somewhat” attached). Surveys of Irish Americans say 50-70% consider themselves to have a strong connection to Ireland and Irish culture, for reference.

The idea that most American Jews, including and especially ‘liberal elite’ Jews, consciously support Jewish ethnonationalism - ie. the specific attempt to ensure Israel retains a Jewish ethnic supermajority - simply isn’t borne out by the facts. That many American Jews care about Israel is obvious. Most Irish Americans care about Ireland, indeed former House speaker Paul Ryan was such an Irish ethnonationalist that he spent years lobbying for massively increased visas (with such a high cap that there would have essentially been an open border) for Irish people to come to the US and President Biden openly taunts the British government with his ethnic loyalty to what he considers his ethnic homeland.

But it doesn’t follow that most American Jews are staunch Israeli ethnonationalists, or have ever given much thought to Israel’s demography.

There are many non-Jewish Zionists in the U.S, interestingly enough. Most dispensational evangelicals are to some extent, as they think theologically that there will be a restoration of Israel before the end of the world, and tend to think that the formation of the state of Israel is a step towards that.

Should morphology be the tie-breaker for sexual categorization?

A common tact one sees in trans skeptical circles is to put forward gametes as the tie-breaker for sexual categorization. In some ways, I like the simplicity of this solution, even as someone who is fairly pro trans. I'm not, in principle, opposed to a categorization scheme that would occasionally split transwomen and ciswomen, since I feel there's always a basic lumpers vs. splitters problem in all categorization problems, and I'm comfortable with either tiny base categories with supercategories above them, or larger categories and smaller subcategories. It's all the same, and the choice between various models of reality seems largely to be a matter of what is useful and what traits we find salient in a given context where we seek to categorize.

But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems. First, a gamete-focused definition is not naturally a binary. There are only two types of gametes, but there are technically four possible ways those two gametes could manifest:

  • Produces only sperm

  • Produces only eggs

  • Produces neither sperm nor eggs.

  • Produces sperm and eggs.

The last situation has never been observed in humans, though it is theoretically possible for a human chimera formed from a male and female zygote to fuse into a single embryo and result in a human with functional gonadal tissue of both types. We do observe ovotesticular syndome in humanity, but 50% of such cases ovulate, and only two such people have been found to produce sperm. Maybe the reason sperm and egg producing intersex conditions haven't happened is for some complex set of issues that result from such a chimera, and so it is effectively impossible.

But even ignoring that, it leaves us with three categories, not two. Now, there isn't actually an a priori reason to expect there to be exactly two sexes in humans, especially when we observe fungi like Coprinellus disseminatus, which has 143 different mating types that can each mate with any of the other mating types besides its own, but most people's intuition before they do any fancy book learning is that there are two sexes, so it seems unsatisfying to have a tie breaker that seems to naturally produce three categories.

Now, it's possible someone will object here that I have framed the problem wrong. Maybe the true proposal for sex categorization is not to use gametes as a tie breaker at all. Given that there seems to be an impulse in some trans skeptics to say that, for example, a trans women who has had her testes removed is still a man, one might conclude that, while gametes are (one of) the most important factor(s) in sex categorization, it is not actually the tie breaker. Maybe they will say that it is a much more fuzzy, amorphous categorization scheme based on a a wide variety of traits, and even lacking the ability to produce gametes altogether doesn't result in a sexless/third-sex categorization if a person has enough other traits common to either of the two (only two) sexes.

Or, they might put forward that it is actually some abstraction like "natural tendency to produce gametes" that is the true tie breaker, and not a person's current ability to produce gametes at all. A eunuch is not sexless, or some third sex - they are always a man, albeit a maimed man. This might still leave us with some problems in classifying people who are naturally infertile and don't produce gametes as mature adults (especially in the case of intersex conditions like ovotesticular syndrome where infertility is common and sex characteristics are mixed), but if that abstraction is truly a tie breaker and not the entirety of sex it would still rescue the idea of there being two sexes in humans.

I grant that either of these approaches could, in theory, rescue a truly two sex humanity.

But there is another misgiving that I have with such a framing, and it applies to all three of these models.

If gametes or some abstraction of them are an important component in sex categorization, then we get an entire class of epistemological problems surrounding sex categorization. I do not have the time or means to sequence the DNA, collect the gametes or see the genitals of every human being I interact with. And yet, my intuition is that I'm reasonably certain about the sex of most of the people I interact with in everyday situations. Here one might be able to make some arguments from evolutionary psychology, or the likelihood that there is some sort of sex categorizing module innate to humans that needed to be fairly accurate in order for humans to successfully mate with compatible mates. Maybe the bias towards thinking there are only two sexes goes fairly deep into human biology and psychology.

But such a "sex categorizing module" doesn't really solve the epistemological issue. Evolution is "lazy" and frequently does a hack job with its solutions. I find women attractive, I love boobs and cute feminine faces and the like. But I still find f1nnst5r, a male crossdresser, attractive in many of his photos. It turns out, it's much harder to code a computationally light sex categorizer when your only lever is whether the genes for your sex categorizer get passed on to the next generation. As long as guys who are attracted to femboys tend to also have sex with fertile women, the mesaoptimzer within you doesn't need to be perfect - just good enough.

All this to say, we can do better than the sex categorizing module in our brain. But if we try this route, we are forced to conclude that we don't know the sexes of most of the people we interact with. Sure, we can go the Bayesian route, and say based on base rates of the sex categorization module in our brain, checked against population-wide data, we can be 98% sure of a person's sex, regardless of definition being used. It might even be an isolated demand for rigor to expect more than 98% certainty. After all, humans also have a "face recognition module" that sometimes sees faces in tree bark and clouds, and yet we trust it to see human faces all of the time.

But I think if we do go the Bayesian route of trying to justify using the "sex categorization module" in the brain, we have actually conceded that the most important thing is actually how a person looks, their sexual morphology. Now obviously, a person could want biological children, and so, for reasons separate from their sex categorization module, care about about whether a particular person they are with is able to carry children, or produce sperm, but that would be something that only matters for potential romantic partners. For ordinary shop keepers and people you pass on the street, the only thing that really matters is the "sex categorization module."

Now, I'll concede that if this is accepted, non-passing trans people would have to be classed as their assigned sex at birth. That's almost exactly what it means to be non-passing in the first place - most people's sex categorization modules see you as the sex you were assigned at birth. But in the case of passing trans people, it would tend to mean that we can lean in to our wonky evolution-addled brains, and accept what we see at first glance. Of course, when we're going to interact with people frequently in our social circle, we could accept nicknames and nickpronouns, and allow these to override our brain's sex categorization modules, but that is a separate discussion.

The problem is that sexual categorization, like all categorization, is primarily functional. We define categories to serve some purpose. The boundaries we should draw are ones that should serve the function we want the category to serve. Sex categories serve different functions in different contexts and so it should be no surprise that people draw the boundaries in different places. Similarly this is why there is no One Ultimate Definition of sex categories that everyone finds sufficient for the purposes they want to put the category too. Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.

To take your own comment, the criteria for what makes one "female" (in a biological sense of producing certain gametes) and what makes one "female" (in a sense of what linguistic term it is appropriate to use to refer to them) can be different! There's no reason these things have to be united, unless we want them to be for some reason.

To take a less politically charged example consider the humble Tomato. Botanically Tomatos are fruits (the seed bearing structure of a flowering plant) but culinarily (and sometimes legally) they are a vegetable. So, is a Tomato "really" a fruit? Or "really" a vegetable? You can pick one definition and call it the "real" definition but there's a reason people developed the alternate characterization and just arbitrarily declaring one the "real" one doesn't resolve the functional purpose achieved by the alternative categorization.

Frankly, this is one more reason I'm generally in favor of trans inclusive language. It replaces language with lossy or ambiguous referents with ones that are much closer to the relevant facts in the world in the appropriate contexts.

Notice all the people downthread who insist it is obvious what a woman is, that everyone knows, but apparently cannot articulate whatever it is everybody (themselves included presumably) knows.

I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.

Can you link me the comment you think I haven't read? I re-checked your comment but it doesn't seem to give any definition for what a woman is.

A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".

It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.

A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men.

Can you tell me more about these natural categories? What features characterize them? Frankly, I am an eliminativist about natural kinds. I don't think there is any such thing. There are facts in the world but any categorization or groupings of facts are things we do as humans.

Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women",

Sure, the question is what is "women" pointing at. Can you tell me?

follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".

Obviously I disagree.

It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely.

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.

Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality".

I understand this sentence to be sarcastic but it's not clear to me why. Different people... do have different numbers of limbs! A universal statement about the number of limbs humans have is false. Less absolute statements ("Most humans have four limbs", "The typical human has four limbs") may be true but the universal ("All humans have four limbs") is clearly not. Similarly we regard left handedness as ordinary variation today but that has not always the perspective society had! So much so that we tried to beat left handedness out of children.

Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.

I am not sure what the "original intended purpose" is or why it is relevant, nor am I clear on why the fact that no one has considered this linguistic difference before means it is not meaningful or interesting. Have all the distinctions it will ever be necessary to make already been made?

There is some equivocation in a lot of the discussion I think we can bring clarity to. It's apparent there is biological sex and depending on who you talk to trans woman aren't claiming this category, they are a different kind of woman, but still a woman in this other sense, let's call it a social category. Social categories can obviously be determined by social consensus. But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like. There needs to be some content provided by something else to give woman meaning in the first place, and that meaning content is biological sex. Identifying as a woman, is definitionally dependent on sex itself. It is actually parasitic on sex, because it tries to undermine the sex category at the same time as depending on it.

Put another way, imagine biological sex is meaningless. I declare my sex to be that of a Novan- what does that mean? Well of course I can socially agree that it means someone who likes pottery and playing bridge but then we are then truly just constructing and believing in the sense of how we treat money. Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.

Can you tell me what facts about a person determine that person's biological sex? Specifically,what facts or set of facts determine someone is in the "woman" biological category such that all cis women are so places and no trans women are?

But what is it that gives trans woman to think they are part of this category. Well common narratives suggest it's because they 'feel like a woman' - but what is the woman property they are feeling like.

My present understanding is that it's some kind of body dysphoria related to secondary sex characteristics in combination with a desire to occupy certain kinds of social roles and relations that often go along with possession of those characteristics. Some of these things are related to biology and some aren't.

Sex is a different kind is category - there is a reality to it beyond assigning an arbitrary set of properties.

I don't agree. All categories are fundamentally social. The set of traits that determine whether someone is a "woman" or "man", is "male" or "female" are things we decide socially like all other categorizations. There are no groupings or categorizations of traits that are any more real than any other.

I think we're honing in to the right space, which is good. To start with the finish, re categories, there's a sense of course where you're right, categories are partly socially decided through language, culture. But there's a sense in which it's deeply lacking -- are the set of square numbers a human category? if socially constructed how do we decide the truth of a category, if we have no external reference beyond ourselves? I guess you might say, by its 'social justice' value, but this just raises another set of questions. If its only human, how would we resolve differences about category definitions -- it could only be consensus or power. Now many social categories are indeed resolved through our language and culture in a process through consensus and power but we also have science, or rationality, to bring to bear. The categorisation of chemicals post Mendeleev was much better than prior, it is even better now. Is it chance that all human societies recognize the categories men and women?

What is man and woman, you asked. Well, I could point to all your descendants, the people that heterosexual and homosexuals are attracted to, the people we most fear on a dark night. The people that suffer mood swings during menopause, bear children, endure pregnancy, suffer childbirth, those with prostate problems and morning glories.

Now of course formally because of the many variations then assigning sex to some individuals does give rise to difficult to resolve edge cases, but a fuzzy boundary does not dissolve the category. We know there are men and women because we were born. The definition is based on this basis, it is the phenotype that gives rise to this successful reproduction, which rather than an arbitrary set of characteristics is a coherent and coordinated set, which we share, with some variation in specific genetics, with the members of our sex. I can articulate a family resemblance, or polythetic, category which would include people with most of the machinery but perhaps lacking a key gene, which keeps them in their sex category even if they can not reproduce. But this boundary doesn't extend to intersex because they do not set up enough of these characteristics to belong to a single sex and they often have (non-functional) elements of both. I appreciate this is messy, but think of a bucket with a hole in it, is it a bucket? What about when it lacks the handle and the entire bottom?

Now this is biological sex, there is also a social category of sex, the way of living in that sex. Intersex live in one of these, whether by their choice, parental choice, or cultural convenience. That doesn't make them that biological sex. Could we then extend the social category to include trans. I think some accomodations were already made in that space, but now we can see a conflict between women's rights, based on sex, and rights of men, say, to self-ID as women. This is a different kind of accomodation- intersex have no choice but trans can be based on as little as the idea in someone's head. This needs to be resolved by negotiation- ironically self-ID has made it harder. Unlikely as it may seem, progressive politics has placed Muslim women at the bottom of the heirarchy of concern.

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.

This was a misspeak on @aqouta's part, they meant discrediting the concept of certain categories, i.e. the ones that would place "trans women" in the "women" category.

I do agree with them that there is a certain game that's always played (and is a bit tiresome) where people attack a definition by pointing out edge cases. It's like, you say that men are born with a penis and women are born with a vagina, and then they point out the existence of intersex people who may be born with an amalgamation of both or neither.

Well, so, what if those people exist? Does that mean that it's wrong to use the category of "men" and "women"? I personally find no problem with using those categories as-is and going about my daily life with much bigger concerns to deal with than where I should properly place intersex people in my mind.

And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.

The reality is, you can't expect people to give a tight, locked-down definition of anything, much less what a man and woman are. All they can do is give a general overview by a common case, maybe describe a few exceptions here and there, but certainly nothing that would stand up to infinite philosophical scrutiny.

And really, it's pointless, because the trans skeptical are simply not going to categorize "trans women" as "women", even though trans women share more attributes of women than most men share attributes of women. The reason for this is simple: They still simply share too many attributes with men, and we are not at an advanced level of technology yet to completely patch them out.

A trans woman has a penis - well, okay, so then they get gender reassignment surgery. But now a trans woman has a hole in their groin that must be kept open by dilation. Sure, a trans woman wears a dress or a skirt, maybe did some voice training to talk more feminine, grew out their hair, is interested in girl things. But a trans woman still has a male bone structure, male bone density, male facial features, male puberty (no, you cannot just "choose your puberty", that's a whole other rabbit hole that's just wrong), etc.

A trans woman has a whole host of very male-like things that can't be faked or changed as easily as their social characteristics.

Well, so, what if those people exist?

Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary. If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.

And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.

In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.

Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary.

I mean, sure, it does that. But that doesn't necessarily mean the definition is wrong and needs to be tossed out. Oftentimes I see these edge cases pointed out by trans activists to argue in favor of a definition by self-identification (which is arguably even more wrong than "penis = man, vagina = woman").

If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.

I think most anti-trans people are in-principle like this too. If we lived in a magical transhumanist future where a man could genuinely become a woman, 99.99% of the time an anti-trans person today would see her as a woman and the question wouldn't even cross their mind as to what sex she is because she's unambiguously a woman. There'd only be a few nutcases who'd care too much about her past history as a man and would be very principled about that, but the case for trans people would be exponentially stronger than it is today if actual transition actually existed. Most anti-trans people don't have all this figured out though and when they see a trans woman, it just looks like a man to them, therefore their argument is that the trans woman's sex-based traits are immutable (which, today, is completely correct).

I feel like a lot of trans debates is obscured by a refusal to acknowledge that transition today with current medical technology is actually, really shockingly primitive.

In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.

Sure, we can carve out edge cases in the law for those people too. But the general definition should still remain.

Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary.

But it doesn't work. There are indeed such traits, and any exceptions are so rare you can safely ignore them. All categories related to things existing on the physical world will work this way, only Mathematics offers perfect definitions.

Further the intersex edge case is useless for trans people, unless you wish to claim only intersex people can be trans.

More comments

If nothing is excluded from being a woman then it renders the concept of transitioning null because any proposed exclusion will apply to transwomen, as it must because if they were already women they'd have no need nor potential to transition. If there are qualities that exclude a person from being a woman then they must and always will apply to transwomen.

Let me switch from the general to the specific.

If having a penis is irrelevant then we're all women. If being cute and girly is irrelevant then we're all women. If uttering the words "I am a woman" is sufficient then four words is all it takes to be a woman, which is effectively no barrier and could happen by accident while reading this post out loud. If having one, or the other, or neither of the possible gamete production capabilities is irrelevant then we're all women. If having someone call you a woman is sufficient then a trivial variation on four words is all it takes: "you are a woman". If putting on a dress is sufficient then all women cease to be women the moment they take their dress off.

Trans rhetoric is glaringly motivated by their central requirement to construct and alter a set of categories that serve only to justify their ends of becoming what they categorically and self-admittedly are not. That's why it's so inconsistent and contradictory. You can't be something and not be something and become something that you already are that you'll never be. It's desparate backpedalling and feigned ignorance all the way down. Their claims on sex and gender strictly start where they are and end wherever they can reach. That is by necessity the full extent of their epistemology, because any extension beyond that entails defeating the conscious objective of their claims.

[Hitting post now, I have an addendum brewing that is both more conciliatory and more condemning]

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women.

Then what is the meaning behind the word "woman"? What conditions have to be met that when someone says "I am a woman" I can reply "no you're not" and have trans activists agree with me?

Can you tell me more about these natural categories?

Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.

I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.

I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.

You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.

But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.

Different people... do have different numbers of limbs!

But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.

I am not sure what the "original intended purpose"

This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?

Human beings, like all mammals, reproduce sexually. The process requires contributions from two distinct categories of humans. The process output is a human who will develop to resemble and be one of these two distinct catagories unless interfered with by a disease or intention effort. This is all fundamental to human reproduction, it is a fact about humans. We call one of these groups, the ones who develop overaries, female or women. Without this process humans would cease to exist and this process requires there to be a meaningful distinction.

Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble? I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological. "Humans develop into one of these normal categories unless something happens that makes them develop otherwise."

I suppose it would be more clear for me to say you want to discredit the concept of natural categories. That categories can be facts about the world. You favor treating catagories as totally arbitrary so that you can draw the boundaries wherever you please. But it's wrong, natural categories exist. It's not just arbitrary whim that causes us to differentiate oxygen from carbon dioxide and there are whole processes, that are very important to humans, that rely on these differences. If you give humans carbon dioxide instead of oxygen they will die. If you don't give plants carbon dioxide they will die.

I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary. Categories are useful at serving various functions and we should draw the boundaries of the categories so they serve the function we want them to. The boundaries of the category are not arbitrary, but decided by the function we want to put the category to. Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.

You can of course propose other methods of categorization but you won't be cleaving reality nearly as neatly at the joints. In fact, as I said before your definition of "woman" necesarily contains my definition to avoid being totally circular, you've just tacked on a "also anyone who we would call a man but identifies as a woman" at the end.

I disagree.

But what you can't do is, after making this new arbitrary categorization, name it the same thing as the category we've been using with my definition this whole time and retroactively apply all the systems and assumptions we've built up under the original definition without having to get wide societal buy in. Women's sports were conceived and are predicated on my definition of woman, not your new one. If you want trans women in women's sports you need to make that case, not just play around with words. People do not like being manipulated and this tactic is so transparent.

What is stopping me from doing this? More generally, part of the argument by the pro-trans side is that gender based categorizations on the basis of the presence of secondary sex characteristics, or appearance, or similar measures more closely track how the term "woman" has been used than a definition based on chromosomes or reproductive capacity. After all, sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.

But humans naturally have 4 limbs. Instances of people with some other number are exceptions where things have gone wrong. If nothing had gone wrong it would be in their nature to have 4 limbs. For the same reason a centipede with 4 limbs has had its nature subverted. This does not make the centipede more human like, it makes it an exception to centipedes. A man who mimics a woman is an except of the man case, not the woman case because it is in his nature to develop as a man. We can call this man a trans women if you'd like and if people are so inclined they can decide to use she/her pronouns - I myself would and have - but she is not a woman and cannot become one.

Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.

This is where it gets maddening. Are you seriously expecting me to believe you cannot fathom why we created woman's sports leagues?

Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.

Frankly, this is entirely too essentialist about humans for me. If someone had, say, a genetic abnormality that caused them to develop a different number of limbs it seems to me it would be in that individuals nature to have that different number of limbs. There might be commonalities of human experience and existence but whatever our "nature" is, it is in us not some metaphysical model from which we deviate.

A common assumption in this kind of discourse, taking after Plato I presume, is that there is an abstract, immaterial essence of humanness or manness or womanness which actual humans and men and women in the material world may reflect more or less perfectly, but which nevertheless exists independently of any physical instance. I think you reject this assumption, and if so I agree; it's one thing to speak of a typical human that has four limbs as a useful generalization, but humans with three or five limbs exist no less than humans with four, they are just fewer in number. If a rule has exceptions, it's because the rule fails to describe reality in full, not because reality fails to conform to the rule.

Can you be more specific? What is it these humans develop to resemble?

Sure. The two natural categories of human develop different features to facilitate their different contributions to reproduction. Most primarily and obviously the woman side develops ovaries and eggs and the equipment around which to facilitate the man category's ability to get sperms in contact with these eggs as well as structural differences to allow for the incubation of the offspring, wider hips and a pelvis capable of pass a baby. In addition to these primary traits women also develop secondary traits that also aid in the production of offspring, one of which the category of mammal gets it's name from, mammaries or breasts to feed young infants. Men naturally develop a different set of features in order to perform their role in reproduction primarily the prostate and semen as well as the equipment meant to aid in getting the semen in contact with the woman's eggs.

All these natural differences cause the two groups to have distinct appearances.

I'm also a little unclear on what is meant by "disease" in your description. I read "disease" as a stand in for "anything that causes humans to be different than my model of normal", which seems like it makes your definition tautological.

Disease is the deviation from natural development that impedes healthy function and development. Heart disease is the category of things that prevent, or reduces the ability for, the heart from perform it's vital task of pumping blood throughout the body. Likewise anything that interferes with humans to develop in such a way that their reproductive ability is prevented or retarded is a disease.

It's not just different, it's different in a way contrary to the function that the organs developed, or would have developed if not prevented from developing, to support. If lack of key nutrients caused an infant's heart to not pump blood resulting in the infant dying we do not conclude that hearts aren't necesarily meant to pump blood because in some situations they fail to. Nor do we say that the infant didn't have a heart. They did, just not a functioning one. We say that hearts are meant to pump blood but can fail, if the heart did not fail then it would have become a healthy heart that pumps blood. Likewise if there is some intersex condition we identify what went wrong in development to cause it, because something must have gone wrong.

I think I have been clear since the beginning I don't believe in natural categories, but not believing in natural categories doesn't make categories arbitrary.

This just strikes me as confused. Do you agree that there are facts about the world? Because these facts necesarily imply categorization. If we agree that atom exist and that atoms can have different stable configurations and that these different stable configuration constitute different materials and those materials have different properties then a categorization system simply follows. Carbon is different than oxygen. This is a natural category.

Categories like "oxygen" and "carbon dioxide" are very useful, because the particular atoms and molecules so described share many properties that let us make useful inferences about them and manipulate them in various ways to our ends.

Carbon and oxygen do not need you to acknowledge their natural category to have one. Carbon and oxygen have been behaving as distinct things far before there were any humans to name them and will continue to do so if we are no longer here. The same is true of mammalian sex. There is no kangaroo word for woman and yet the joeys find the self in their mother's pouch anyways. In communication we are forced to use words which are only maps of reality, but the purpose of the words is to faithfully describe reality. Reality contains categories. You are using language for a reason other than to describe reality for some means you find just. I get it, people appear to be suffering from a condition and desperately wish reality was different - I see the temptation to just lie about the mapping between words and reality. But it's a lie, a kind of linguistic defection.

I disagree.

You disagree that your definition of woman necessarily contains mine?

What is stopping me from doing this?

I suppose nothing is stopping you from trying. Just like nothing is stopping you from attempting to enforce a category of "healthy food" inclusive of human excrement. But I'm not going to eat it uncoerced.

sterile women are still women and we had a concept of "woman" long before we knew anything about chromosomes or gametes.

Sterile women, if not afflicted by a disease, would have developed into healthy non-sterile women. They are unfortunate exception that do not in any ways undermine the category.

Who is "we"? I am skeptical that every women's sport league that ever was created was for the same reason.

Give me three different plausible justifications.

Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate.

So what do you do when a trans woman manages to emulate womanhood better than many real women? Man and woman is not a binary; you have feminine men, masculine men, feminine women, masculine women. There are absolutely males who are so feminine they better encompass the "woman" concept than a good chunk of cis women.

Like this meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/lnf0lw/conservatives_dont_really_understand_biology_smh/

I wouldn't want the person on the left to be in a woman's washroom tbh. And to a lesser degree, I wouldn't want the person on the right to be in a men's washroom.

What do you do if a male sexual predator wants to use the same restroom, bathroom as your daughter.

If you don't believe weird and dangerous men are taking advantage of gender self-ID, check out Grahem Linehan's (father Ted) Glinner Update where he details a steady stream of them (under the banner "This Never Happens", which points to the naive assumptions of a lot of progressives).

I think it does happen. I don't think there are easy solutions.

Tbh I think it might be best to make the new gender system "Woman" and "Other". Being a woman comes with privileges like access to protected spaces such as women's washrooms, and only biological females have access to it. Everyone else uses the "Other" category when it comes to stuff like sports and washrooms, whether they're trans women, cis men, or trans men. If individual groups want to say trans women are welcome to participate in their Women's category, they're free to, but you can't sue an organization for excluding trans women from their women's category.

So what do you do when a trans woman manages to emulate womanhood better than many real women?

This is nearly meaningless. There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men. There are other people in this thread arguing about whether trans women can "pass", I don't find that question all that interesting.

There is more to womanhood than being attractive to men, and some trans women embody that better than some cis women.

You've clearly not read the rest of this thread you're replying to. It is impossible for a trans woman to have a body that if not interfered with will develop into being able to bear children better than a cis woman.

But I lose information content if I adopt your trans-inclusive language, a man identifying as a woman is more informative, than just woman. It's also true and scientifically provable. Why is this lossy or ambiguous - the trans inclusive language is ambiguous because it conflates gender identity with biological sex.

I mean, dropping an adjective always conveys less information than including it. "Woman" contains less information than "trans woman" but "man" also conveys less information than "tall man." The question is in what context the information conveyed by the adjective is useful. The "trans" adjective conveys useful information in some contexts and not others. Same for the trans inclusive language.

Yes agreed, but the goal is not context-dependent usage, it's controlling choice of information conveyance in entire tranches of life, media, workplaces. It's implying this is the actual reality with no need to dig beneath. Why people would insist on the usage of third-person pronouns is perverse to me. People should be free to use whatever descriptors they consider useful.

I mean, the point is that they consider the adjective as not conveying any additionally relevant information. If every time I spoke about my coworker Bob I called them "Fat Bob" people might wonder why I was doing so, what relevance his weight had to the question. I think this is pretty analogous to how trans people feel.

Yeah, I'd adjust my usage to just Bob as well in time, who wouldn't, but I don't want to be told off for telling a new person who doesn't know Bob that he's that fat guy with the long hair.

If every time I spoke about my coworker Bob I called them "Fat Bob" people might wonder why I was doing so, what relevance his weight had to the question.

I think the issue is that, almost always, when "trans woman" is said, it's a context analogous to one in which Bob being fat is highly relevant (dunno, maybe discussing jobs involving going into tight alleyways to fix things?), and the default presumption was automatically that Bob would be skinny. Personally, I'm having a hard time thinking of a context in everyday social life to me where the "trans" in "trans woman" wouldn't add critically important information.

There's a lot of people who don't use the word "woman" to refer to gender, and who consider someone's sex to be relevant information. Insisting on using the "trans" qualifier is an attempt to meet you half way, but as with many things, doing so only seems to result in demands for courtesy being pushed even further.

"Tall man" is just additional information: A tall man is for all intents and purposes a man, his height isn't affecting his man-ness.

"Trans man" is a qualifier. It doesn't just add information, it also removes information that is normally contained in the description "man". It's not just less information, it's also ambiguous.

"You're a man, so you should regularly get checked for testicular cancer" makes sense, because "has testicles" is part of "man". This is information you expect to have from "man", so the qualifier is required in the case of "trans man" to warn you that some qualities of "man" might not apply.

If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.

You don't say "president" if you mean "vize president" or "year" if you mean "half-year" either.

Substitute "sterile" for "tall" in my comment then. Or substitute "testicle-less" if you think having testicles is an essential component of being a man.

If you drop it because it doesn't seem useful in context (leaving aside that that's controversial almost everywhere) then you're still implying information that isn't there, and once it does come up, there will be confusion.

Am I also doing this if I refer to a man who has had a double orchiectomy as a "man", without the "testicle-less" qualifier? Should I be required to add that qualifier the same way I should add "trans"?

Fair enough, bad example from me, but there's a both qualitative and quantitative difference here. "Testicle-less" or any other example is just one property out of too many to list. Here the only reasonable thing to do is deal with exceptions as they come up. A trans man, however, is missing a lot of the properties of men, and a lot of what's there is artificial. Usually, a man naturally has a number of properties that can be deducted from knowing he's a man, with the exceptions being rare and surprising, because everything in nature has exceptions. A trans man does not. What's more, a trans man has a lot of the properties of woman, which in humans is the opposite of man.

Most of the time where it's not reasonable to distinguish between men and trans men, it's not reasonable to distinguish between men and women either.

I would broadly agree with this, yes. But the current trans inclusive position is that Transwomen Are Women in all circumstances and for all purposes. When we are trying to determine who changes clothes with each other, which kids attend sleepovers together, who runs footraces against each other, who gets in boxing rings together, who is ruled in or out as a sex partner, who counsels rape victims, and who is imprisoned together - for all of these purposes, TWAW.

I generally agree that the trans inclusive position considers trans women to be women for the purposes you've listed but I don't think it's for all purposes. For example, I think the trans inclusive position includes trans women being prostate exams when cis women don't. Or cis women needing pap smears when trans women don't.

Sure, it does that, but in medical settings it confuses the fuck out of exactly the uneducated and ESL people who most need to hear about eg annual pap smears. If you say, “Everyone with a cervix should get one!” that’s very precise, but a shocking number of people won’t realize it applies to them. If you say, “Women should get one!” you catch more cancers early.

Sure, if our terminology does not serve our purpose we should adjust our terminology so that it does, but the magnitude of the impact of the concerns expressed here are not clear to me.

For most purposes and in all but the most rarefied settings, “woman” does just fine. It’s not a dog at anyone who isn’t a central example of the category - it’s really not. You don’t see women who’ve had hysterectomies freaking out that we’re erasing their existence by referring to “women” rather than “menstruators.”

It's not that it's a "dog" at anyone, necessarily, it's just that it is underspecified. In the same way there are some people who are ESL or uneducated who may not realize they have a cervix there are people who need pap smears who do not think of themselves as "women." Now, I think the people who have a cervix but aren't women are probably more likely to understand they should still get pap smears than people lacking in education or who are ESL but it's a similar kind of concern.

And frankly it’s dehumanizing to be referred to by my uterus or its functions. You can disrespect 50% of the population or .6%. Take your pick.

I am skeptical anything like all women agree with you. I can't speak to the concern directly but I'm a cis man and don't think of a term like "people with prostates" as disrespectful at all.

I am skeptical anything like all women agree with you. I can't speak to the concern directly but I'm a cis man and don't think of a term like "people with prostates" as disrespectful at all.

Speaking for myself, if someone calls me “person with a prostate” I will be at best very weirded out and would probably try to find the quickest way to get the fuck away from that person.

Wouldn't that depend on the context the term is used? "Room for rent, looking for people with a prostate" I agree is bizarre and dehumanizing; but "People with a prostate should occasionally get tested for prostate cancer" seems to me pretty reasonable, and if anything more precise than any plausible alternative. Similarly, I wouldn't be caught dead using "people who menstruate" as a term to refer to women in general, but something like "people who menstruate are at a greater risk for anhaemia" is if anything better targeted advice than "women are at a greater etc." (I think, I'm not an expert on anhaemia), given that a fairly large fraction of women do not menstruate and therefore are not the subject of that statement.

I'm a cis man and don't think of a term like "people with prostates" as disrespectful at all.

I'm a cis man and I find this kind of language very creepy. It's uncomfortably reminiscent of the sort of intentionally distancing, unsettling and euphemistic language found in dystopian sci-fi.

Instead of just looking at passing, there's also the factor of hormones. Due to this, they start to actually have attributes of the other sex in ways that they previously did not, and that are not just makeup and outward aesthetic changes. Of course, that's still limited, and so they remain hard to categorize.

But imagine we had some perfect technology that could fully and perfectly, change someone's sex, down to a cellular level, etc. In that case, we should recognize them as being the opposite sex than they had, I would think. Current treatments are currently very far short of that, while still being something in that direction, which is one reason why there's all this disagreement over what we should do.

The first point you highlighted is an example of a "trait cluster" sex model, and I think it can form one basis of accepting trans women as women.

How feminized does a male body need to be before it is "female"?

I do think you're right that some sci fi technology may come along to throw a wrench in the current form of the debate. What will people say when you can do gene therapy and grow a new set of genitals to order for a person?

This is kind of a problem that paradoxes of identity have in general—it's hard to draw a clear line, since at every point the change is practically negligible. I don't know that I'm comfortable with handing out a bunch of criteria, since edge-cases are hard.

I think it might often be good to think about it, in those weird edge cases as "basically male in these ways, basically female in these ways, kind of in the middle in these ways, like nothing else in these ways," etc. But that doesn't distill things into a concise summary, and so isn't always useful.

I do wish that it wasn't praised in some subsets of society to try to push yourself into the messy middle.

How feminized does a male body need to be before it is "female"?

Orders of magnitude more than we can currently accomplish.

If such a technology existed, it would radically change how people conceptualize gender. I think it would be de-emphasized to meaninglessness. It would be akin to categorizing people by what color clothes they wear.

You'd still have whatever mental issues made them want to transition.

Is curiosity really such a mental issue? If you can change your sex more or less at will, I don't know why most people wouldn't jump at the chance for the experience: it's reversible after all, in the hypothetical. It seems no weirder than wanting to see what being a bird is like for a couple hours.

If you can change your sex more or less at will our conception of gender and sex norms would be completely different. It's possible a lot of what drives MTF/FTM to want to transition wouldn't exist in the first place.

If technology is that sufficiently advanced we could presume there'd be a 'cure' for this population to allow them to be happy with their natal bodies.

Some trans people would argue that such a “cure” would fundamentally change who they are as a person, as opposed to say, plopping the same brain in a new body of the opposite sex. It would be akin to having a pill to cure homosexuality when you could instead just accept people for who they are.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about it because going from one sex hormone to the other also changes who you are as a person (I’ve experienced this as someone who went on HRT), and there’s reports of dysphoric biological female teenagers going on testosterone blockers and that significantly reducing their dysphoria to the point they no longer need to transition.

But, given the two options, I would probably go with the perfect transition, because it’s a lot more interesting.

fundamentally change who they are

In terms of fundamental change, happy as I am, seems a lesser / smaller change than the alternative.

I would think a pill to cure homosexuals would be popular. Though I can imagine there would be opposition. There's opposition by some in the deaf community to cochlear implants.

I’m much more averse to altering my brain than altering my body. To me a perfect sex change would be plopping my existing brain into a body of the opposite sex, while a dysphoria cure would involve fundamentally altering my existing brain structure.

Me with a different set of genitals is still me; me after a treatment that changes my self-perception and my sexuality… seems like a much bigger change.

To me the gender swap is the cochlear implants, whereas the curing gender dysphoria is like making you OK with being deaf and having you live in an idyllic deaf community. Sure, some of those people are very happy, and it’s better than being miserable because you don’t know what everyone around you is saying, but I would much prefer to be able to actually hear.

Someone that has undergone some kind of sci-fi procedure to wind up in the body of someone of the opposite sex at, say, 25 would be a very interesting person. They'd have had a quarter-century of socialization and life experience in their birth sex. That would have a strong impact on who they were as people afterwards.

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Hormones literally alter your brain structure, almost certainly more than altering whatever is causing dysphoria would. I can understand someone who has been trans for a while and has built up an identity around it, but once we have a pill that just removes the dysphoria that should be the last generation of trans people.

Some trans people would argue that such a “cure” would fundamentally change who they are as a person

So would cochlear implants. It hasn't posed a significant moral problem for us I think.

It is only a problem if you buy into the idea that an illness or deficiency has the same value as the natural functioning of the body. But that is putting the cart before the horse.

Given that transpeople are claiming that their dysphoria makes them suffer so significantly that care is mandated and most of their gains have been based on a mostly pragmatic desire to avoid this suffering they have less room here than many - e.g. homosexuals - to complain.

This starts so well- indeed I commend you on the points you draw attention to, but it fades in the later stages.

You initially point out that sex is binary, though the development and expression of this sex binary leads to different possibilities for individual organisms, male, female and intersex. This makes three sex categories but not a sex ternary, it is natures attempts to attain male or female with different developmental issues arising but there is no third sex capable of procreation.

We know that the body attempts to create male and female because of our scientific understanding of biology and evolution - the telos is inscribed by the actual history of the universe, whereby humans evolved to reproduce sexually, ie we all descend from mothers and fathers, eggs and sperm.

The essential aspect of how we assign sex is indeed not straightforward because of the genetic variation that is possible at each stage. But often categorisation is difficult, the complexity and philosophical difficulties don't undermine some essential reality just because it's hard to determine how to explicitly assign edge cases. To start the exploration, in humans it's the phenotype that leads to the development of functional elements that allow for reproduction, chiefly eggs and sperm, whether as potential future, current present, or prior capability. For most people this means a host of associated functional developments that are required and for most of us these line up nicely and we are functional males and females. For some, genetic anomolies occur such as failure for the placenta to develop or sperm that don't sperm. So functionally these people can not reproduce but it seems wrong to assign them as no-sex. But categories are not only formed based on a single rule, they can be based on family resemblances, or polythetic categories where not all members need to share every attribute. A single gene should not remove you from the sex category and the change certainly doesn't make you more like the other sex.

For intersex the change is more fundamental, earlier in the ontogeny and more prior in the phylogeny. The variation does lead to some change in the direction of the other sex and so for this group of people their sex is indeterminate, biologically speaking.

This doesn't exclude some people living as if they were a woman but finding out they were not in fact that sex, eg swyer syndrome.

So far so good. Im not a biologist but I think not only do we have knowledge of male and female sex from evolution as our basis for understanding it's reality, we could also construct a reasonable categorisation for individuals.

But you agree with this. The rest as far as I can tell is spurious thinking related to sex appearance and whether we can detect it. I don't know how to parse this as it doesn't seem at all confusing to me. Yes there are masculine woman and feminine men, but there is still the reality of whether they can reproduce or whether the similarity is just cosmetic.

Why is there a need for a single classification of sex that’s used in all instances? There’s clearly multiple concepts to which sex and associated words refer to: which gametes you produce, which chromosomes you have (karyotype), which morphology you have (phenotype), and which gender roles and social expectations you occupy. Why would you try to collapse all of the above into a single “real” binary classification instead of just using the appropriate concept for what you’re trying to communicate?

E.g., if you’re saying “look at that man over there” to refer to a passing trans woman, you will (at least initially) confuse your interlocutor, because as you said, humans categorise people as men or as women based off their appearance, and a passing trans woman gets put in the category “woman” for her social interactions by people who don’t know otherwise.

Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy, will I have really fulfilled the request? What if I came with a very attractive woman with CAIS instead? Clearly, the words “man” or “woman” don’t refer to the person having XX or XY chromosomes in common usage.

At some level I guess this is an ontology debate - I’m firmly in the camp that believes categories aren’t real, but they can be useful, and they should always be understood as fuzzy. Take the “is a burrito a sandwich” debate - it’s clear that there is a property of “sandwichness”, which a burrito had less than a BLT but more than say, a soup.

There’s similarly a property of “‘maleness” and “femaleness” that trans men and trans women have different degrees of than cisgendered people, depending on their innate traits, how long they’ve been on hormones, what surgeries they had, etc, and that will impact what strangers refer to them as, and what gender-based expectations they get hassled with.

Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy, will I have really fulfilled the request?

How many 6' bearded trans men who look like biological males are out there? The FTM photos I've seen range from "looks like a butch lesbian" to "is a short, dumpy, androgynously featured person who may or may not have a wispy goatee".

Is this the kind of woman you mean by "clearly the words 'man' or 'woman' doesn't refer to the person having XX or XY chromosomes in common usage"? Would you introduce Emily to your straight friend looking for a woman? For comparison purposes, when Emily was still Anthony.

Now, they've only been on HRT for a year. If they lose a ton of weight, get surgery, do the voice exercises to change how they sound, etc. then one day there may be "Emily passes sufficiently enough that you don't immediately go 'that's a guy'". But if you tell me that you'd uncritically introduce Emily to someone straight looking to date a woman, because "categories are fuzzy" and "we don't judge people on their chromosomes", I doubt it.

So yeah, we can tell men from women just by looking in the vast majority of cases. And just by looking, we're going to go "Emily is not a Real Woman in the sense of exactly the same as a cis woman". If "Trans women are real women" was happy to accept "but not the same thing as cis women", fine. Unhappily, there is a contingent who push for "exactly the same as a cis woman", citing "I have the biology of a cis woman; I'm on HRT, so are women who are post-menopausal; I may not have a uterus but neither do women who have undergone hysterectomies; they are accepted as women so should I be".

Surely you know how this game goes? You share non-passing trans people, I can share passing ones. What do you think about 6’3 Mitch Harrison who competed in the Titan Games? Sure not all trans men look like this (but most do eventually pass as short effeminate men), but they are out there - both me and gay men I know have dated trans guys who passed.

I wouldn’t introduce a passing trans woman to a straight man uncritically, because most straight men aren’t interested in trans women and many are downright threatened by the concept, genital preferences are a thing, and the cost-benefit ratio is too low. But, I could gently approach the subject and see if that particular person is interested - I have done so in the past, I’ve had straight friends say “if she’s hot and had bottom surgery, I don’t care”. And what do you think is more likely - that a straight man would be interested in a trans woman that looks like this, or for a trans man that looks like Laith Ashley? Which one do you think confuses gay men, and which one confuses straight men?

Trans women aren’t the exact same as cis women, and I’m happy to accept that. Both the “trans women are exactly the same as cis women” and the “trans women are just men in a dress and we can always tell” camps are wrong.

Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy

I would think most straight men looking to date probably wouldn't be interested in dating someone who had transitioned in either direction.

But I've always had a slight discomfort with the gamete-focused definition of sex. Even if we allow that sexual categorization is based on a cluster of traits, like chromosomes, genitalia, bone density, face and body shape, etc., where we're just using gametes as the tie breaker, I think we run into some problems.

The strongest form of the gamete definition is not gamete-focused around a cluster of traits. The strongest form only concerns gamete contribution to sexual reproduction, which is binary in mammals. Sexual reproduction is a well defined process at the core of sexual selection, which has been known since at least the publication of On the Origin of Species. Examples of a species in class 1 are male. Examples of a species in class 2 are female. Examples of a species that are in class 3 are sterile. Examples of of a species in class 4 are hermaphrodites.

Primary sexual characteristics are the organs that produce the gametes.

The things you see at first glance for clothed individuals are secondary.

The use of the generic "trans" rather than the specific "transsexual" or "transgender" only adds to confusion when determining exactly what people are discussing.

The strongest form of the gamete definition is not gamete-focused around a cluster of traits. The strongest form only concerns gamete contribution to sexual reproduction, which is binary in mammals. Sexual reproduction is a well defined process at the core of sexual selection, which has been known since at least the publication of On the Origin of Species. Examples of a species in class 1 are male. Examples of a species in class 2 are female. Examples of a species that are in class 3 are sterile. Examples of of a species in class 4 are hermaphrodites.

I think the issue is that this biological definition is rarely relevant in a human context.

First, humans in the anglosphere (at least) tend to think sex is salient even for prepubescent children who are unable to reproduce. We presumptively use "he" and "she" for kids even though we know that 9% of men and 11% of women experience reproductive issues. Even after a person has become physically mature, we don't generally say they're "not a man/woman" just because we discover that they don't produce gametes properly, or can't reproduce for any number of other reasons.

I agree that your four classes are a categorization scheme that should exist somewhere in the English language. It's very useful to biologists, and an important idea for people to understand.

It also seems to have only a weak correlation to how we colloquially use language.

This is exactly why people talk about biological sex, presenting sex, and gender. That does not change the definition of biological sex. Using the terms interchangeably does nothing for clarity. He, she, man, and woman when used colloquially are typically used with an associated gender. That gender is correlated with sex (when describing people in English), but does not necessarily have the same definition.

Reproductive issues in the form of infertility is not identical to sterility. Yes, the normal usage of man or woman would typically still hold. No, sterile people cannot become biological fathers or biological mothers.

Those four terms exist exactly to describe the cases in your bulleted list.

The correlation is strong. The r value is larger than 0.7 which is the threshold used to determine if a correlation is strong in the sciences, including biology.

Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?

Sure, I'd be okay with treating something like Bitcoin as money in some cases, since it bears enough of a resemblance to money.

He's asking if you'd treat something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill as a hundred dollar bill.

Something that looks enough like a hundred dollar bill to be accepted as legal tender is a hundred dollar bill.

How would they send people to prison for making them if they are hundred dollar bills, and if fake hundred dollar bills aren't accepted as legal tender, why bother criminalizing them?

If the note was real enough to be universally accepted as legal tender, the forgery would never have been identified and reported, and nobody would go to prison. The history of paper money is full of examples of new security measures designed to combat the genuinely successful and broadly undetectable forging of notes.

However, as I note above, we’re a very long way from this being true in this situation.

If it was relatively inexpensive though nontrivial to switch sex - some kind of sci-fi lab grown body tier shit - what would happen? What would happen if it cost three months' wages to switch sex? That would be a hell of an interesting thing and an interesting environment to be in.

The issue is that's how likely something is going to be accepted is a question of how closely you look. A fake bill is no less a fake because someone accepted it.

We eventually found the Superdollars that most likely North Korea was producing, but those were good enough to remain in circullation until the Treasury drastically changed the look of the $100 bill.

I don't think I argued anywhere that the best tie breaker for money categorization is morphology.

Different categories have different kinds of resemblance binding them together.

It's just that arguing it's the best tie breaker for sex seems rather arbitrary. I don't see a good reason why it should work for sex and and not dollar bills.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world. Since the evidence on humans having pheromones is mixed, and the existence of porn seems to indicate that the mere visual presence of a woman is enough to arouse a man, I think the argument that there is something like a sex determination module that leverages visual information is pretty strong.

The visual information is based on a subset of the morphology of a person being looked at.

Now, it has been a broader trend in science to move away from morphology as a primary basis for classification, as we have developed more sophisticated tools for observing "hidden" things like DNA, hormones and microscopic structures, so I understand why genetic or gametic models of sex are popular among people who want solid and fixed definitions. But part of my argument is that the "hidden" things we can now measure are less psychologically fundamental than the visual (and thus morphology-based) sex determination module in the brain.

Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world.

I think that's a sleight of hand. It's like saying a stick bug is de facto a stick, because my brain's bug determination module is using that standard about bugs and sticks in the world.

I'm not sure I see what you're getting at here. I don't see why having a model that classifies people on the basis of their biology in some way conflicts with the fact that people sometimes present in a way that makes them appear to be the sex they are not.

There's no meaningful epistemological issue here. Yes, people can dress and generally display themselves in ways that will deceive others as to what their biological sex is, or just look relatively androgenous. As you say, this means that maybe 2% of the time, we are wrong about the sex of people we see on the street. But in the vast, vast majority of those cases, we could figure out their biological sex if we really needed to (say, to determine whether or not to allow someone into a sports competition limited to people of the female sex) relatively easily.

Is the implication of your model that if a biological man lets his hair grow out, such that some percentage of people confuse him for a woman, even if he hasn't actually changed what he "identifies" as, he "is" a woman in those interactions?

What you or I think the tie-breaker should be does not matter - this is being adjudicated in courts of law and the current rule was made quite clear yesterday:

The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset. Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear. The medical defendants, speaking through their attorneys, have admitted it. At least one defense expert also has admitted it.

...

Despite the defense admissions, there are those who believe that cisgender individuals properly adhere to their natal sex and that transgender individuals have inappropriately chosen a contrary gender identity, male or female, just as one might choose whether to read Shakespeare or Grisham.

...

Any proponent of the challenged statute and rules should put up or shut up: do you acknowledge that there are individuals with actual gender identities opposite their natal sex, or do you not? Dog whistles ought not be tolerated.

Gender identity is real, the gender someone says they are is their real gender identity without respect to natal sex, and attempting to hedge will simply result in being legally overrun. Personally, I would have preferred to live with some detente, a Schrodinger's gender situation, wherein I agree to be polite and pretend to not see what I plainly see with my own two eyes and my easily clocked interlocutor agrees not to be too pushy about the matter. But no, that's not where we're at in 2023 - the legal status of this is going to demand that you either accept that trans woman are women, full stop, or stop dog whistling and declare openly that trans women are men.

Gametes are used in biology because it works across species, while chromosomes or morphology don't.

The two stable equilibria are large cells (eggs, high investment) or small cells (sperm, cheap and mobile). There are no in between sized cells.

All differences in the sexes stem from this fundamental point. It is the reason for sex organs being the way they are. It is why female mammals are the ones who get pregnant and produce milk (they are the sex who invests more)

Different sized cells lead to different life and reproductive strategies, which lead to different morphologies, in body and mind.

Morphology follows from cell size, to focus on human morphology is to lose the perspective that we are just one of many animal forms building on binary gametes.

As a sort of trans skeptic, I find this discussion to be missing the point. I have an internal notion of "men" and "women" which, however elegant, "just" or in correspondence with simple criteria like chromosomes it is or isn't, has served my model of reality quite well so far. Why does some political group arrogate to itself the right to replace this notion, or really any part of my map, with one that they favour? Maybe the median person is used to their concept space being dictated from above by teachers, journalists and politicians, but I thought of our social contract as entailing that adults at least in principle have the right to be persuaded rather than threatened into updating their thinking. No other element of the progressive policy package seems to go quite as far towards demanding submission in thought rather than merely in deed.

The contention is that the 'internal model' is possibly more pro-trans than anything else, since it says that a trans person who passed in your estimation would be considered by you to be their goal sex.

Right, sure, but this isn't the case for any of the contentious cases I have encountered yet. Conversely, I don't think that if you told me any person I know well underwent karyotyping and were actually found to be the opposite chromosomal sex from what I took them to be, I would feel any urge to update my mental category for them accordingly (this is intended as a statement about how well my mental categories seem to predict on the set of people I know well); this would even continue being the case if they then announced that they will "socially transition" to their chromosomal sex (this is intended as a statement on how little the things people change when they "socially transition" actually overlap with the qualities that I care for when I use my m/f category as a predictor).

I don't actually think so. If you see a fake barn, and think that you saw a barn, that just makes it a very convincing fake. You're using the visual traits to infer the other traits. It correlates very highly (or there would be no point to doing so) but not perfectly.

Yeah, all the biological stuff is besides the point. Gametes, chromosomes, whatever… I can tell a man from a woman without sampling his DNA.

... but I thought of our social contract as entailing that adults at least in principle have the right to be persuaded rather than threatened into updating their thinking.

This ended when Gorsuch penned the Bostock ruling. Whatever you thought the social contract entailed, the law is that trans women are women and that treating them otherwise is discrimination, punishable in civil suits with the full weight of the government. You may be permitted to think what you like in your own head, but behaving accordingly will not be tolerated.

I actually agree with you. I’m happy to call any transwoman who passes a woman.

However, I have never encountered a truly passing transwoman. Ever. Perhaps 5% can pass in (posed) pictures. Maybe 1% can pass on video. 0% in real life, where the tiny tells and minutiae of body language are a clear giveaway every single time. Put me in a room with 999 cis women and 1 transwoman, and after 5 minutes of conversation with each I’ll be able to identify the latter.

Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!

Nobody truly passes.

The obvious point is that you only notice the non-passing transwomen, so of course you can identify 100% of the non-passing transwomen whom you correctly identified as being transwomen.

I 100% agree that the posted photos of transwomen on reddit rely heavily on makeup, clothing, lighting, and camera angles. And even then, most aren't that great. However, it's my understanding that people who transition before puberty are in much better shape.

Ability to orgasm seems orthogonal to the quality of one's shape to me. Inability to reproduce seems more relevant, if we're talking about sexual function.

This downside pales in comparison to the downside that puberty might be one of the most likely things to naturally resolve the issue in the first. The false positive rate is hugely important here.

I’m not sure what you’re saying- that puberty takes away the ability to orgasm(uh, it kind of does the opposite for most people?)

I'm saying that puberty may be what cures some large amount of people of their gender dysphoria. The studies showing how few kids who go on blockers desist are evidence to this. And while not being able to orgasm is quite a problem I'd rank the possibility that we're committing many people who would have desisted to be trans anyways even higher.

The obvious point is that you only notice the non-passing transwomen, so of course you can identify 100% of the non-passing transwomen whom you correctly identified as being transwomen.

You can notice a range of transwomen, some of whom pass better than others. Based on this, you can make deductions that extrapolate the size of the group that passes perfectly, even if you can't directly see them.

However, it's my understanding that people who transition before puberty are in much better shape.

It’s very important to note that most trans teens on puberty blockers do actually start puberty before they go on them, so the effect isn’t total.

There are some very rare cases where a transwoman is ‘fully’ able to avoid male puberty. Jazz Jennings is a good example. Does she pass? I think it’s a more complicated answer than just ‘yes’; she has very broad shoulders as an adult for her build, at least from the 5 minutes of YouTube footage I just watched.

One thing that Jazz and quite a lot of very-early transitioners who are sometimes considered to pass (eg. NikkieTutorials) have in common is that they’re very much overweight. This obscures many minor and moderate physical differences between sexes, and softens out parts of the masculine facial structure.

Go on /r/transpassing and sort by top all time. Even the MOST passing transwomen on Reddit as voted for by their own peers don’t pass. And that’s in posed photos!

To be fair, this is not as strong a point as you're making it out to be, given that you already know that each of these people is trans by virtue of the subreddit's name. I agree that many of these pictures look obvious but I'm not sure whether I'd have the same confidence if these were presented in a gallery of portraits of random cis and trans people.

On the rest I agree entirely. It reminds me of this post by @Walterodim. For any given measure men can come arbitrarily close to the female standard, but combine multiple and the difference becomes clear as day almost every time. From a probably highly curated sample like the top posts from your link a number could plausibly be women going by the image alone, but I've never met someone in real life where the full package including voice, stature, body build etc. didn't tip me off immediately.

Maybe you personally have an extremely good ability to detect trans women, but most people don’t. Plenty of trans women don’t arouse suspicion in their daily lives, some are able to go stealth, some are able to have medical professionals think they’re biological women and get asked about pregnancy/periods (a real anecdote). Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.

If you had to put rough numbers on 'percent of trans people that pass' (among some specific groups of trans people, and for some specific groups of observers), what would they be?

There are very very few trans people. The fact that any can be clocked in public is evidence that a decent portion of them do not pass. The Canadian census says they are only 0.3% of people age 15 and up (closer to 0.1% for those over 50). And that's including nonbinary (aka trend chasers). You are three times more likely to meet a schizophrenic than a trans person. If you are seeing enough to notice they don't pass, the fact that you're noticing them at all is proof that a large portion of them do not pass. I've been on /lgbt/, I've seen the photos on trans subreddits, profile pictures on twitter, and from lesbian dating apps. These are not cherrypicked sources, they are as close to the modal trans person as you can get. There is a sea of obvious men in dresses, and a few who are young enough/got enough surgery and drugs that they can fool someone, at least in a photo. This mythical mass of unclockable transwomen going about their lives incognito simply does not exist. This becomes even easier in certain male-dominated spaces. 100% of "female" doom modders and professional foreigner starcraft players are transgender. I wouldn't be surprised if 70-90% of "female" speedrunners are transgender. Certainly they outnumber ciswomen massively.

Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.

"Straight" being the operative word. I have about as much confidence in their straightness as that French spy who somehow didn't notice the Chinese spy he had sex with for years was a man (intact, even!) More likely they are deeply closeted gays, got drunk/high enough that they took a transwoman to bed after their inhibitions were lowered, then the cognitive dissonance became overwhelming, and they lashed out because they have deep emotional problems. Chasers claim they're straight too, doesn't make it true.

Chasers aren’t gay, they’re GAMP (gynandromorphile), meaning they’re attracted to the combination of female and male traits, generally a standard female body + male genitalia. Genital arousal studies have been made on this.

Also this reflects my experience, the type of man I attract as a trans woman is different from the type of man I attracted as a gay man. The former type is genuinely attracted to femininity - they love when I wear make-up, lingerie, or otherwise act feminine, whereas gay men don’t care about that one bit and are often actively turned off.

I’m fine dating bisexual men so I don’t care too much, unlike some trans women who are absolutely obsessed with getting straight men to validate their femininity. But I couldn’t date a gay man.

Just like the gay men who usually are turned off by displays of femininity so are most GAMP turned off by overtly masculine features.

I don't condone such violence and cried during 'Boys don't cry', but I think this points to something important that I'm not hearing in the debate. Being trans and trying to pass is a deeply ambivalent stance both for the trans person and those they engage with. Because I am a scientific realist I recognize the difference between someone appearing as a woman and being a woman. If a man appearing as a woman were to encounter me in a romantic sense and not disclose that, I would count it as a deep betrayal. I hope I wouldn't react violently but I would feel violated in some way. This is no judgement on the man and their choice necessarily but when the rubber hits the road, ie biology becomes relevant, then it's fundamentally dishonest to pass yourself as something your not.

Also the psychological stance of trying to pass and worrying about it seems burdensome for the individual and an example of iatrogenic harm. People that are clearly trans and don't pass actually are much easier to accommodate and I can imagine might find relationship building outside their immediate identity more psychologically natural, though this is just a guess.

What exactly is the harm in a trans woman passing as a woman? I agree that you should disclose to your romantic partner and medical professional, but otherwise, why do you owe work colleagues, acquaintances, random service workers on the streets the need to know your biological sex?

But out of curiosity, why would you feel violated if you were attracted to a woman and found out she was trans? By a romantic sense, are you talking about just going on a date, or having sex? In either case, how exactly were you harmed? You were attracted to her, had a presumably enjoyable experience (assuming she is post-op)… so what pushes you towards wanting to inflict violence on her?

I personally would always disclose to a romantic or sexual partner, and would keep doing so even if I was stealth and post-op, both out of principle and desire for my own safety. But I still don’t see how you are harmed in this interaction. There’s certainly straight men out there who have no problem having sex with trans women and don’t let it impact their sexuality, and some who aren’t into it at all but just politely decline and move on.

I have no problem with those that choose to experience sex with trans, all the power to them. It's not my cup of tea because I like women, real women, that sounds somehow prejudiced or old fashioned but if you believe sex is real then it actually means something. I viscerally would not want to have sex with a man, and especially a man pretending to be a woman. This is just me and is no reflection on the other person.

The harm I've tried to tell you is deceiving me with appearance. A man passing as a woman can not have babies, and is inhabiting a psychology of pretense that creates a distance that fails the test of intimacy at the first hurdle as far as I'm concerned. It's just not how I'm built I'm afraid.

Now if people disclose, that's entirely another matter. I have no problem with people in all their variety. I'd question whether the person couldn't have found another way that didn't involve medical intervention but I'd take them as they are, I wouldn't likely consider romantic involvement but Id be happy to partake in conversation if they're interesting. But the body to me is not just a sack of meat, it is the primary link to reality and a failure to accept it seems to me like a failure to truly accept oneself. That probably sounds judgemental but it's how I orient to life. Be gay, be a feminine man, be gender non-conforming but why change your body drastically with all the attendant risks, or if someone is trans why would they pretend to be something that they are not - if someone is not born a woman, how could they ever know whether they are a woman? The most one that person could know as far as I can tell is that they feel comfortable appearing as a woman. Well why would they hide that truth in the pretending to be a woman?

I like women, real women, that sounds somehow prejudiced or old fashioned but if you believe sex is real then it actually means something.

Sex alone doesn’t govern your attraction. You’re not attracted to ovary ducts or XX chromosomes, you’re attracted to the female phenotype. Otherwise you’d be attracted to the very good looking trans men I linked earlier.

I viscerally would not want to have sex with a man, and especially a man pretending to be a woman. This is just me and is no reflection on the other person.

Getting called a man, especially a “man pretending to be a woman”, is distressing for trans women. That is why many attempt to pass. It’s also a way to avoid the negative attention that being a visibly trans person can bring - many people are hostile towards trans women, but if they see you as a regular woman, you’ll be safer.

Personally, I’m hoping that one day we have the technology to have good enough sex changes that trans women are indistinguishable from cis women including in terms of reproductive capabilities. At that point, would you still say they are men pretending to be women, or would you agree that they are men who have turned into women?

But the body to me is not just a sack of meat, it is the primary link to reality and a failure to accept it seems to me like a failure to truly accept oneself. That probably sounds judgemental but it's how I orient to life.

Why should I accept it when I can change it? The option is literally there, it’s not perfect but it made a noticeable improvement in my life.

If anything, accepting being trans is what took the most courage. I tried to deny it for years, and tried to be something I wasn’t.

Be gay, be a feminine man, be gender non-conforming but why change your body drastically with all the attendant risks,

Believe me, I’ve tried everything else. I couldn’t stand my body before I transitioned, now I can finally stand to look at myself in the mirror. Life is short, and the option not to have a body I despise is literally right there. Why shouldn’t I take it? What’s the upside of being miserable?

Now, I can have real relationships, I can enjoy sex, I can be a lot more intimately fulfilled than I used to be. I’m grateful for all the physical changes I am experiencing, a marked difference from how I dreaded puberty (I may not know what it’s like to be a woman, but I certainly know what it’s like to become more of a man by going through male puberty and male aging, and that was an awful experience).

I'm not discounting your experience, it sounds like it is working out for you.

I am describing my private mental experience of finding out that someone who I thought was a woman, was not. Im not at all convinced that I wouldn't suspect it in any case.

Perhaps the man 'pretending to be' is overdoing it, 'identifying as' is kinder. And I'm not necessarily talking about public life, but private spaces. I don't know why someone would hide that info and I find it condescending, or even infantilising for people to agree that trans identified are that sex, and self-denying of the person to deny their actual situation.

More broadly on the topic, i think that society should change to be more accepting generally of difference. It feels like a regression from social liberal goals to accept that hiding as a woman is the best path. We also don't know enough about the effectiveness of transition to push it as a culture. Its not ubiquitous that people experience relief, some people suffer regret, ongoing medical problems and persistent dysphoria post-transition. I'm worried about the child safe-guarding implications of pushing transition to younger ages so boys can look more girlish and pass better and I think we should run solid research that tests other approaches and gives us a more robust evidence base. We should seek to understand body-identity issues better and investigate why the rates are increasing.

None of this happens if we adopt a trans-human stance and push trans as a solution as a culture. We are not even currently measuring the desistors well.

Sex alone doesn’t govern your attraction. You’re not attracted to ovary ducts or XX chromosomes, you’re attracted to the female phenotype. Otherwise you’d be attracted to the very good looking trans men I linked earlier.

Right, he clearly isn't looking inside someone's chromosomes to tell what sex they are. I think @ShariaHeap probably thinks something like this:

He's attracted to the female phenotype, and maybe trans women can manage to fool him, by mimicking that. But there are other factors that he might want in someone attractive, like having ordinary genitalia, or maybe being able to bear children, or maybe just that he wants to be in a relationship with a woman on a level other than what's attractive, and doesn't think that passing is sufficient to count for that. (and knowledge can affect attraction, as well)

And then by passing and attempting to be in a romantic relationship with him, the hypothetical trans person would be wasting his time by holding out in front of the appearance of a relationship he wants, that in actual fact he can't have.

Sex alone doesn’t govern your attraction.

Yeah, it's a necessary but not sufficient condition for attraction. You can't claim it's bigotry just because it excludes you.

Getting called a man, especially a “man pretending to be a woman”, is distressing for trans women.

Aren't there a whole bunch of trans women who claim to have no dysphoria, and isn't using dysphoria for gatekeeping seen as bigoted?

Why should I accept it when I can change it? The option is literally there, it’s not perfect.

For the same reason we tend to think it's better for people with other forms of body dysmorphia to accept their body rather than change it. The option for them to modify their body is also literally there, and for a person who doesn't like their leg the result of amputation is probably more perfect than a typical result of transition.

I admit I always had trouble understanding dysphoria, but I can concede there's some amount of people for who transitioning is the best option. OTOH it seems obvious that the option to accept your body the way it is, is far superior when it's available.

the tiny tells and minutiae of body language are a clear giveaway every single time. Put me in a room with 999 cis women and 1 transwoman, and after 5 minutes of conversation with each I’ll be able to identify the latter.

Interesting that you mention this.

There's a pattern in certain "women-only" public online spaces (like lolcow.farm for example) where people get quite paranoid about trying to identify which posters are actually male and which aren't. "That's a male way of writing", "that's a male opinion to hold", etc.

On the one hand, it's not surprising that a dynamic like this would develop in an anonymous or pseudonymous online space. If you want to have a community for only X, but the only way to identify if someone is an X or not is by their writing, then that's fertile ground for people to start making accusations. The interesting thing rather is that it would be harder for this dynamic to take root in a hypothetical "male-only" forum. It seems to me that there is no particular male way of thinking or male way of writing - a man can be anything (except, perhaps, a woman).

Similarly with your example of trying to identify the one trans person in a room. I'm not at all confident that I would by able to identify the one FTM in a room of men (even trying my best to ignore the fact that T can make FTMs look very convincing on a purely physical level). I don't know of any special pattern of "male behavior" that I could look for. There are loquacious men and terse men, autistic men and flamboyantly gay men, frat boys and feminine types and everything in between. Maybe if I asked pointed questions about gender relations and politics then I could be pretty accurate. But if all I had to go on was "tiny tells and minutiae of body language"? No way. And I don't think that's just me being on the spectrum - I think men are just too varied in their presentation and comportment.

I think there's this idea, consciously or unconsciously, that women have a certain special "it" factor (an "it" that could, among other things, identify them as women to other women, as you suggest), and this idea helps explain both why some MTFs want to transition in the first place (they want to have "it") and also why people react so negatively to MTFs: they're transgressing on restricted territory in the social-symbolic space that doesn't belong to them.

FTMs don't draw the same ire because maleness is the position of universality rather than particularity. A man can be anything and anyone can be a man (sort of). It's a public park rather than a gated community.

I completely agree with you on FTM transitioners. They don't really interest me, they're not what the debate is about and nobody except butch lesbians upset that most of their peers are becoming transmen cares all that much about them as an issue.

I mean, I care because I want them kicked out of gay spaces.

I think there's this idea, consciously or unconsciously, that women have a certain special "it" factor (an "it" that could, among other things, identify them as women to other women, as you suggest), and this idea helps explain both why some MTFs want to transition in the first place (they want to have "it") and also why people react so negatively to MTFs: they're transgressing on restricted territory in the social-symbolic space that doesn't belong to them.

The "it" is basically automatic Wonderfulness, an automatic halo effect. Hence why MTF trans garner much more controversy than FTM.

MTFs are often viewed as attempting to steal the valor of women, attempting to co-opt the Wonderfulness, privileges, and protections usually afforded to women. In contrast, FTMs are attempting life on a more difficult setting, which may just garner an understanding pat-on-the-back from the bros.

Sometimes TERFs and the like have momentary blue screens of deaths where they wonder "Are we the baddies? Is my opposition to MTF transsexuals rooted in... misandry?"

FTMs don't draw the same ire because maleness is the position of universality rather than particularity. A man can be anything and anyone can be a man (sort of). It's a public park rather than a gated community.

Maleness is open league. Sports provide literal examples of open leagues, where “men’s” professional sports teams are actually sex-agnostic. It's not the case for women's sports, e.g., the WNBA, WTA, etc., spaces carved out for women to play.

Bathrooms are another example. Men using women's bathrooms is far less accepted than women using men's bathrooms. It's pretty much a regular occurrence in nightlife, that women will use men's bathrooms. It's also another opportunity for chicks to double dip in attention whoring and advertising their wares for male attention: Ugh, why are these thirsty scrotes staring at us while we elephant-walk past them to use their bathroom.

Sometimes TERFs and the like have momentary blue screens of deaths where they wonder "Are we the baddies? Is my opposition to MTF transsexuals rooted in... misandry?"

Doesn't sound reasonable, TERFS are usually down with the misandry.

Will your opinion change when technology advances enough that biological cis women are no longer necessary for reproduction?

Already you sure maleness has no privilege in and out of itself? By default, men are taken far more seriously in professional situations, have medical professionals disbelieve their medical conditions less often, get sexually harassed a lot less, and the ability to cooperate easily with other men is a certainly advantage. It depends on what you’re after, but if you’re trying to say, be a successful businessperson, being a woman can be a double edged sword - the extra attention you get from men comes with strings attached. As a male if you have an investor or customer interested in you, you can be pretty sure it’s because they’re interested in the business and not because they want to sleep with you.

Also, why does it make you angry? What impact is there on your life that some trans women out there pass and get treated socially as women?

Already you sure maleness has no privilege in and out of itself? By default, men are taken far more seriously in professional situations, have medical professionals disbelieve their medical conditions less often, get sexually harassed a lot less, and the ability to cooperate easily with other men is a certainly advantage.

Men are also more likely to be abandoned to their fate if they are marginal (see the homelessness rates) and I don't see why I'd give men "privilege" for the ability to cooperate with each other unless I also gave them a malus for being more likely to violently assault one another and attribute the absence of that amongst women to "female privilege".

IME few feminist or purveyor of privilege theory do this. In fact, they seem to do the opposite: men's heightened risk of assault and violence and longer prison sentences are the result of "toxic masculinity" (with the not-subtle implication that it is men's fault and issue, unlike problems that impact women) and women are EDIT: not privileged for avoiding it.

but if you’re trying to say, be a successful businessperson, being a woman can be a double edged sword

What if I, as a man, want to be a successful kindergarten teacher?

A stay-at-home dad?

you can be pretty sure it’s because they’re interested in the business and not because they want to sleep with you.

And what about all of the benefits that can come from leveraging sexuality? Or just the general "women are wonderful" effect?

Men are also more likely to be abandoned to their fate if they are marginal (see the homelessness rates) and I don't see why I'd give men "privilege" for the ability to cooperate with each other unless I also gave them a malus for being more likely to violently assault one another and attribute the absence of that amongst women to "female privilege".

“Privilege” is a loaded word and I personally don’t like it.

My point is that maleness has intrinsic advantages. So does femaleness. Those advantages may be more or less relevant to you, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t any drawbacks; an advantage in one area does not necessarily nullify a disadvantage in another.

Historically, men’s ability to co-operate in large hierarchical social structures was hugely beneficial, and the aggression was harnessed towards the “enemy”. That competitive streak can still be an advantage today.

In fact, they seem to do the opposite: men's heightened risk of assault and violence and longer prison sentences are the result of "toxic masculinity" (with the not-subtle implication that it is men's fault and issue, unlike problems that impact women) and women are privileged for avoiding it.

Men are generally more aggressive due to testosterone and a culture that perpetuates and encourages male aggression. Women tend to be hyper vigilant about the risks of being assaulted while men are the opposite - I had a lot of guys surprised at how I’m always paranoid walking alone at night or being suspicious of male strangers.

What if I, as a man, want to be a successful kindergarten teacher? A stay-at-home dad?

Women would be more likely to be successful at those, yes. Pros and cons.

And what about all of the benefits that can come from leveraging sexuality? Or just the general "women are wonderful" effect?

As I said, double edged sword. Not everyone is comfortable with leveraging their sexuality and there are risks; some men will blacklist you because you didn’t sleep with them, and sleeping your way to the top is a reputation hazard. Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.

Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.

Here's a claim I'll put out there: men are already largely valued by how much women want to have sex with them. Or speaking more precisely, there are certain markers of social fluency / status / desirability that matter more, when it comes to making snap social judgments regarding a man's value, than his skills and abilities. This is where you get anecdotes like this one related in Chapter 3 of Volume I of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, in which the nuclear scientist's girlfriend laughs at his attempt to demonstrate value through his (scientific) skills and abilities. Or alternatively, all the scoffing and schadenfreude-ing at Minecraft creator Notch for leading a life of loneliness despite creating the best-selling video game in history (although that can be argued to be driven by sour grapes ("I might not be friggin' rich like him, but at least I get poon!") and general antipathy towards his politics). Actually, it might be more apt to say in men's case that they are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them.

[ Note, by the way, that I'm talking about "value" here rather than "success" (the latter of which I'm taking to mean "success in a corporate / academic / career context", given that words like "skills and abilities" and "success" tend to be used more in that domain these days rather than, for instance "skills and abilities as a parent" or "skills and abilities as a Little League coach"), because I don't believe that career success and the like for women is all too tied to sex appeal. Here's an anecdote, but most high-achieving Women In STEM that I see are not lookers, to say the least. I've heard similar from people in other "intelligence-heavy" (so to speak) fields such as law. Now, maybe the situation is different in more public-facing or "soft-skills"-heavy roles like marketing or management - but frankly, we know that men in those areas are also selected for attractiveness. So if the claim is that women are only able to advance in their careers to the extent that they're attractive, then that's a claim that I personally don't buy. (I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.) ]

But returning to the original idea: if women value me because they all wanted to have sex with me - well, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world by me. Of course, one could note that sex is for men what commitment is for women, and say that a fairer analogy would be to say "how would you feel if women valued you to the extent that they found you emotionally useful?" In that case, I wouldn't be quite as happy; but to say that this analogy would be fairer would be to ignore a key component of what it means for a man to be sexually attracted to a woman. It's the same component that's ignored when women get mad at guys for asking them on dates after a long period of friendship: "Uggh, he only wanted to use me for sex?" No: for a man (going by my own experiences and those of other men I know), when you're attracted to a woman sexually, then everything about her becomes more attractive. Her jokes become funnier; her insights more profound. It leads to a self-reinforcing feedback loop of attraction (because when these other qualities become more attractive, then this raises the level of physical attraction as well). Take that into consideration and being valued as a woman because a guy wants to have sex with you seems pretty nice, given that it comes as a package deal with him valuing you as an intellect and a wit.

Then again, this entire post is largely a "grass is greener"-type situation, now, isn't it. I do stand by the claims that "men are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them" and "being valued as a woman for your sexual attractiveness is pretty nice", but I understand that it's not necessarily all peaches and cream.

Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.

I'm not sure if I'm just reading more into the word choice than is warranted, but I'm not sure how it could be dehumanizing. Men mostly aren't interested in having sex with non-humans, and furthermore, that's a pretty critical part of how we make more humans, which is a pretty significant aspect of being a human. Perhaps it'd be insulting in certain contexts, in that it feels better if one's own success in a field is from one's competence in the field rather than one's sexual attractiveness (holding incompetence constant, it's also an open question if it's preferable to have success in the field due to one's sexual attractiveness compared to having non-success in the field due to one's incompetence being accurately assessed). But I don't see how it's dehumanizing. I'd see it as the exact opposite, if anything.

‘Sex categorization model’ is something that goes on in caveman brain. And let me put it this way- Grug not know what ‘trans’ is. Grug know there is man, woman, and freak. Sometimes Grug treat freak as woman or man to be polite, but whole tribe know freaks not men or women if it actually matter.

Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation. We don’t have to care on a deep mental level about drawing up some definition, because you can’t change caveman brain and it’s in the drivers seat. And honestly I don’t want to have to keep track of 56 genders, and I don’t want to have to do a bunch of sophomoric mental masturbation to justify that or to justify that no, a 35 year old natal male claiming to be a woman doesn’t get to shower with my teenaged daughter. If society tries to make me I’ll just declare 54 of them freaks that the tribe should make sleep at a separate fire, farther out where the wolves are, and tell them ‘have you considered being normal’ if they complain.

What do you do when trans people pass so well they fool the caveman brain?

e.g https://old.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/lnf0lw/conservatives_dont_really_understand_biology_smh/

Trans people have always been with us. Nature is not perfect. I have heard it said that there were four genders: men, women, crackpots, and mutants. Separating crackpots and mutants is a hard thing to do with the medical science of 2023. Perhaps someone will find a way to do it, and the people of 2160 will look at us like we looked at the age before germ theory.

Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation.

Maybe, but you haven't added enough light to the conversation to justify the heat you're bringing. Assume for the sake of argument that the objectively correct response to transsexual choices, behavior, or advocacy is mockery: here at the Motte, you can argue that this is so but you are not permitted to actually deploy the mockery. You can say "we should call freaks freaks" but you cannot nakedly assert "these people are freaks." I assume that people find it challenging to walk that line since almost everyone I know, here and elsewhere, is really quite bad at it. But it is the line that has been drawn around this space so you need to adhere to it here.

This is deliberate effort to bring scientific sounding language into an already settled situation to confuse and muddle waters. It is also isolated demand for rigorous categorization, something that for instance is not required if the same person argues for let's say race-based affirmative action where OMB recognizes 6 races (Hispanic or Latino, White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander), quite a shallow categorization of immensely diverse situation - don't you think?

As others said, everybody knows what man and woman is even with all the "subcategories" such as post-menopausal or infertile women and so forth. Everything else is unnecessary sophistry. I can use another more innocuous example as an analogy: what is a chair? There are so many subcategories. You have office chairs and kitchen chairs, you have chairs with multiple legs or even those designer chairs without legs. You can have metal chairs and plastic chairs, you have chairs with or without armrest and who even knows what is a difference between chair and stool and even table for that matter - you can sit on a table and you can eat from chair, can you not? It is all so fluid, chair is whatever you think it is. Except no. Everybody knows what a chair is for purpose of virtually all the conversations in human history. We are not interested in this kind of sophistry outside of some funny niche philosophical discussions, we do not have to bring it into the mainstream for sure.

Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.

Legally, this sort of thing could be relevant, I suppose, and it could be relevant in those relatively unusual cases, but yes, ordinarily it's not difficult.

However, transitioning probably puts the person into an unusual case, where it does take some work to decide how to handle things, because of effects of hormones.

Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category.

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?

Does it matter that it occurs in 10% of people? If being left-handed had instead occured only in 0.01% of people would it then be correct to say something like, "Humans are a bipedal, right-handed species"?

We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."

I think if we're being as pedantic as possible, the best you could say is something like, "Your body works in way X, most people's body works in way Y, but with a surgery Z we can make your body work in way Y as well."

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?

I mean, if we're going to question the concept of disease and disability why start there? Seems "convenient" to start on an edge case that most people would acknowledge (presumably because there's other factors at play that prevent one assuming that variation is disability - e.g. almost no impact on what we consider right and healthy functioning)

Seems like this easily collapses into a general challenge to the idea of health as a normative category.

So what about people born without an arm? Or many other actually painful congenital conditions? How do we know that's "unhealthy" or a "disability"? Do we just not? Is there no normative sheen to any of this?

I think this leads to strange places that are at least out of step with most people's intuitions.

If it doesn't, then I don't see how this point isn't subject to the same critique being made of this concept of gender: it's a deliberate attempt to occlude the fact of a generally accepted category by using edge cases.

You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.

What about something like autism spectrum disorders? A mild case of autism can be beneficial; how many technological and scientific advances do we owe to people who had autistic obsessions in engineering, physics, programming, etc.? Some autistic people see “normies” as the dysfunctional ones and are able to be very successful and productive in the right environment - but there’s a point where it becomes entirely a disability. Where do you draw the line?

You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.

Yes, it was deliberate.

Thats my point: OP criticized the very idea of normative categories due to biological deviations but conveniently picks one deviation that most people would now argue falls outside of the category of "disability" (because such people fall within the normative category of "healthy").

It seems to me that even in his attempt to "problematize" such categories he's trying to leverage their assumptions. Presumably because arguing that "health" as such is a meaningless category is a fringe position.

It's only a "leap" once I accept that there is such a thing as health and it doesn't exclude certain minor deviations but excludes larger ones. On the category skeptical view who is to say?

I want to push him to apply his logic consistently, to cases intuitively considered less thorny.

If he doesn't see this as a problem then I refer back to my OPs final paragraph.

I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.

So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation. Most cases are clearcut so this doesn’t matter, but occasionally you do have ambiguities, like sickle cell traits which offer resistance against malaria at the cost of other health complications - it’s a disease in the western world, but in some African countries it can literally save your life.

I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.

So, if categories do carve reality at the joints sometimes, how does this square with:

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

You're providing one potential grounding and justification of categories - they are tied to important things that are truth-apt. Why is that not enough for grounding, when OP's own examples seem to quite clearly show implicit use of "meaningful" categories?

I think OP is being inconsistently nihilist. He should either pay the full price of nihilism or accept that he's right there with the rest of us and can't just blithely dismiss categories via edge cases to avoid inconvenient exclusions.

Put it another way: can I use OP's argument to dismiss, I dunno, flesh-eating bacteria as a disease? If not, why not? How does the above argument not prove too much?

So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation.

I don't see how that helps OP. First of all, it's debatable what's objective or not (or what we mean by it). Morality is widely considered objective by ethicists and is even more subject to this criticism.

For another: why does "disease" need to exist outside of humanity? Isn't it enough that OP seems quite clearly able to see that "left-handedness" is only weakly (or not at all) within the disease camp but flesh-eating bacteria would be? Why did he not leverage a more intuitively absurd example? If they know they can't, why do they think they can just dismiss categories when they're quite clearly guiding him?

I don’t agree with OP’s blanket dismissal of categories. “Disease” is a very useful category, my argument is simply to recognise that humans have a tendency to ask “is X a disease” when the real question actually is “should X be cured”, and focusing on whether X is a “really” a disease or not is pointless.

Flesh-eating bacteria neatly fit into the category of “disease”. But, is having sickle cell traits a disease? Is having parasitic worms a disease? You might scoff at the latter - but there’s potential evidence that over-sanitation and elimination of parasites is what is causing the huge spike in auto-immune conditions in the west. So it’s important to ask the real questions, which is “should we cure X”, or “how do we manage X”, not “is X a disease”.

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there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

Normal doesn't mean "accounts for all cases". There is little doubt that those with very unusual disabilities or those that put substantial effort into mimicking the opposite sex are not normal. And that can be fine, people don't have to be normal. Abnormal doesn't even strictly mean bad. I do not understand this impulse some have to destroy the concept of normal to spare obvious outliers the small pain of accepting the obvious truth that they are not normal. Or at least the reasoning that does make sense for this impulse is very uncharitable.

To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?

Sure, being left handed can be abnormal. It is either a, very slightly, unfortunate mutation or maybe a, very slightly, fortunate mutation in some rare cases like fighting or tennis where it can throw your opponent offguard. No one is surprised when a tennis couch says "normally when the ball is here and your opponent is here you'd expect it to come back in so and so way, but with a lefty so and so". These sexual mutations are much more straightforwardly unfortunate as they carry practically no benefit and quite a bit of downside.

We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."

In some cases sure, but being sterile is very clearly not how the body is supposed to work. The purpose of the reproductive system is to produce offspring, if it can't do that then it is defective. Being defective is about as dead center of a sound basis for declaring something not working correctly as I can imagine. If you can't rule this as abnormal then I question what you actually think normal could possibly mean.

Normal has a purpose, it lets us treat special cases as special cases and suspend normal treatment as necessary. Which is, possibly uncharitably, what I think is behind this whole shell game. You want trans people to be treated not just as normal, but as normal for their desired sex. Those of us objecting to this want to be able to treat trans people as abnormal members of their natal sex. And I think we have tremendously better reasons to do so. I think you want what you want for laudably empathetic reasons, you see them as suffering and that they deeply want to be treated as normal members of the opposite sex. But this violence you're doing to the concept of normal to try and force them to fit is ridiculous and cannot stand. It is wrong to enforce an incoherent worldview, even if done out if empathy. It can't even stand in its own legs, the norm of cis female needs to exist in order for trans women to even emulate it.

I find all this excessive academic-isation and navel gazing over this stuff to be kind of tiresome these days.

Everyone knows what a man and a woman are. Every single human has known, for thousands of years. Pretending you don't and then splitting hairs over exact definitions to try and gerrymander a group onto the other side of the line because it fits with your politics is just... I don't know. Extremely blatantly the same kind of nonsense as trying to redefine racism so that you can't be racist to white people.

Appealing to extreme edge cases like the tiny fraction of a percent of people with serious intersex conditions and people who have suffered accidents, and then arguing that because nobody can find a perfect rule that includes all of these cases, we should scrap everything we ever knew and start over, is assuming we need to come up with a rule in the first place. We just don't. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, in the same simple and uncomplicated way that they have been for the preceding centuries of recorded human history. Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing. An old person scammed by an indian phone scammer into buying an "antivirus" that is nothing of the sort, even if they really and truly believe the software is protecting them from threats, did not actually buy an antivirus.

the sex you were assigned at birth.

Sex is not assigned, it is observed. The essential nature of the person... is observed.

So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.

Millions of people go to college every year, they all need to be taught by PhDs. Few of the PhDs have pure teaching positions, so we need armies of professors who's job it is to teach future office workers to write.These professors need to publish research, so we end up with an endless torrent of "well actually papers" and iterative hair splitting.

So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.

I don't think even my proposal was "nice, neat and perfect", but I can touch on why I think well-made categories are important (if not "necessary.")

I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far. Language is a tool for communication, and communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.

It's obviously not a very serious example, but the argument that people sometimes have over "Is a burrito a sandwich?" can illustrate some of the problems. Everyone knows what a sandwich is. Everyone knows what a burrito is. But in spite of "everyone knowing that" there are people who seriously argue that burritos are sandwiches, and people who argue that burritos are obviously not sandwiches. If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing.

I agree - Finnster is a man. He's never denied this, and I'm not even sure he's trying to deceive anyone, since he's open about being a cross-dresser. To the extent that he "deceived" me, it was at the same subconscious level that a cloud might "deceive" me by resembling a face.

But I'm not sure your "essential nature" thing gets off the ground. If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.

I think a person should be prepared to put forward their metaphysical commitments. Was Casimir Pulaski, who was "observed" to be a man, lived as a man all his life, and who was only discovered after death to possibly have had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a man? You might say that all his contemporaries were deceived or mistaken, and he simply was a woman with an intersex condition, or you may say he was indeed a man - but either way you can't just wave him away as a weird edge case. Either you know what the essential nature of a man is, or you don't. A single edge case is all one needs to make the case that thinking there's an "essential essence" to something much more fuzzy, in spite of how much we might want the world to consist of nice, neat, and perfect categories.

Categories are imperfect, sure. But what’s being defended by most people against the “trans agenda” is the idea that physical intersexual bodies are a statistical anomaly so small as to be bordering on anecdotal, and that gender dysphoria is a rare mental disorder resulting in a delusion, not an oppressed minority identity deserving of protection.

It follows from that perspective that altering gendered language in laws, issuing puberty blockers and sterilizing children, teaching children about gender identity in socially contagious ways, and issuing punishments for calling a male body in a dress “him” are absurd, cruel, malicious, and tyrannical, and evidence of a malign undercurrent trying to force those with eyes to deny what they can clearly see.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that it became politically relevant that of all the decimal numbers starting with 2, only 2.0 + 2.0 exactly add up to 4.0. Academics start discussing how the vast percentage of numbers which are approximately 2 do not precisely add up to 4. News shows start discussing the “2.3 paradox” nightly, and calling people who focus on 2.25 and below “anti-mathematical”. “Even 2.2 added to 2.45 makes 4.65 which anyone can clearly see is 2/3 of the way to 5,” says one top pundit, carefully reading from a TelePrompTer to avoid misspeaking. New math books are issued to younger school grades to ensure that five-year-old children never again blithely and ignorantly claim that 2+2=4. Pretty soon it’s accepted fact among news-watchers that only the small minority of numbers starting with 2 add up to 4 at all, and anyone who says “2+2=4 is common sense math, obviously true” is to be shunned and possibly fired.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. [Winston’s] heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.” - Orwell, 1984

If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all?

Then that also leaves trans people hanging out to dry, since their main argument is "I never felt like/I don't feel like I am my biological sex, I feel like I am the other sex". So what does it mean to "feel like" a woman? Especially since there is a subset arguing that you don't need to feel dysphoria about your physical body and you don't need to 'pass' to be trans - a woman can have a penis! a man can get pregnant!

"Feeling like a woman" means you didn't want to play with boy's toys? You wanted long hair and makeup and to wear skirts? But those are all gender roles, and there's no reason why men can't wear makeup and skirts and have long hair and still be men.

Unless we're going to bite the bullet and say "transgenderism is a mental illness; not feeling like you belong in your biological sex category doesn't mean you are the opposite sex, it is a form of dysphoria like the people who want to amputate healthy limbs" and treat it as such - even if people transition and are legally now female (or male) that does not mean "trans woman is exactly the same thing as a cis woman down to biology", then we're stuck with "well there is no definition of what is a man or what is a woman, so trans people can't 'feel like' a woman since there is no such thing as 'feeling like a woman'" and then where do they go? They seem pretty sure, for all the talk about intersex conditions and not judging on genitals, that they know what being a woman and being a man is meant to be.

I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far.

But "gets you so far" means "gets you as far as you want to get in pretty much every case where someone isn't trying to fudge it."

Pointing out that it might fail when someone is trying to fudge it doesn't change that.

Given that about 1,600,000 people in the US are trans and there are various legal standards that rely on gender rather than sex; we do need to define this shit.

If a support only fails under load greater than X where X is a possible load 1/250 times; that shit needs to be fixed.

If a support fails under load when people are deliberately pounding on it trying to make it fail, but otherwise does fine (and if the support failing for one person didn't make automatically fail for everyone else, unlike a real one), what needs to be fixed is people deliberately pounding on it, not the support.

communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.

The words were used perfectly well for hundreds of years, and only really came under fire lately because a bunch of people started demanding to formalise and change the definitions. To me, this seems like a conflict caused by an impulse to precisely define things, and I'm not so sure that resolving it by doing just that isn't simply de facto conceding the point.

If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

I just don't think anyone is confused about who they will and won't spend the rest of their life with, and I definitely don't think anyone will be changing their opinion on whether they will spend the rest of their life with someone based on the gerrymandering of definitions of man and woman.

If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood.

Should it? Why is it necessary, given those words were used perfectly fine for hundreds of years without one? Why is it actually necessary, other than that trans people want to be considered as the one they are not? What, other than that, was wrong with the way they were used up until this point? Everyone already agreed that a man who lost his penis in an accident was still a man.

If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.

When you pass a person on the street, do you know if they're a man or a woman? Despite knowing absolutely nothing about them? Despite never interrogating their internal world or genetic structure, or ever once consciously referring to whatever explicit definition of those terms you might hold? The calculation happens faster than the speed of conscious thought, you know what the stranger is on a deep and instinctual level without even having time to ponder about it.

You might even be deceived, but the initial assessment happened faster than you could even think about it. You know what a man and a woman are.

Agree there’s no reason to even think thru the current fashion. We’ve known a man and a women for thousands of years. There’s no reason to over think common sense.

Unless there’s really some pesticide going through our environment messing with peoples hormones(which the pronoun would hate finding a real reason). But in that case we should get rid of the chemical messing with gender stuff.

For thousands of years people also "knew" that the Earth was the center of the solar system. I too think that the conventional notion of men and women maps better onto the actual distribution of human characteristics than the trans activist notion does*, but appealing to common sense is not a good argument for it.

*With the caveat that it is actually a distribution rather than a pure binary distinction. However, the distribution is so dominated by the two clusters of "men" and "women" as traditionally understood that the conventional notion of men and women does not lose much from a pragmatic perspective even if it is not technically accurate.

I don’t think earth was center of universe is a useful comparison. Humans well are humans and being male or female is intrinsic to being human. The earth we had no way of viewing.


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