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An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
You can make anything an insult with the right context. If someone objects to being called “retard,” it’s not the old scientific definition that’s the problem. It’s weaponizing that definition. This holds whether or not the slur is being used strategically (as in your hypothesis).
An academic discussion of gender theory might use “cisgender” without it being a slur. A drive by dunk on “cishet shitlords” will not. God knows which is more common on the platform.
If Musk or his mod team really care about harassment, they’ll moderate the latter but not the former. If they’re just looking to score CW points, I guess they’ll ban both.
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I don’t think that’s a very good definition of a slur. A slur is better defined as a word that in practice is mostly used to convey invective.
The term ‘colored people’ is very dated and not what most African Americans prefer to be called. But, it is not considered a slur because the typical African American reaction to being referred to that way is very, very different to being referred to as a nigger.
And it seems like whether cis fails that test is just a bit more debate able. Obviously we’re mostly familiar with shrieking internet trans activists using it as a synonym for ‘devil’ while hurling invective against anyone who disagrees with them, but the same can almost be said for ‘white’, and I’m given to understand that spaces with lots of… differently gendered… people cis is regularly used for disambiguation. I have no idea what the actual distribution of those two uses is, and I think the distinction of ‘you can’t call someone cis when they don’t want to be’ is probably fair, but the idea that it’s definitely a slur in the same way as ‘nigger’ or ‘tranny’ needs some more justification.
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Because normal people object to being called something other than normal? Trans people having so much support in the media skews how truly abnormal almost everyone thinks they are. Its a bizarre scene whenever a trans person enters any not-LGBTQ (on and on) place and starts trying to fit in. So they often don't even try, they just start being bizzare and demanding respect. Some FTM people can moderately pass as really weak looking soyboys. But they seem much less even a part of the project. Those are mostly very depressed people who's depression continues so brazenly through transition they are lucky to ever see people as they can often not exit their abode. Contrasted with the never passing loud MTFs that so often represent the movement, and well, the abnormality is so stark that calling something that is not that anything but normal is simply a bizarre turn of vocabulary.
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
The answer, in part, is idiosyncratic billionaire activism. This is not unusual; a significant portion of the major social changes over the past half century have coincided with major trends in institutional philanthropy and/or social trends among the upper classes (e.g., the role of the Ford Foundation in advancing feminist and black activism).
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My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
I don't think that really follows. Liberals may have won the legal conflict and even shifted the Overton Window on homosexuality, but it's not like everyone suddenly agreed in 2015 that homosexuality was fine. Yeah, maybe homophobes have accepted that they can't scream "Fags go to hell" in public anymore, but that wasn't terribly common anyway and in the mean time that hasn't stopped them from pursuing anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric.
What anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric have you seen post-2015?
"Homosexuals are pedophiles" has flared up again, laws aimed at functionally excluding acknowledgment of homosexuality from public schools, polling indicating ~30% of the population thinks gay marriage should be illegal, anti-drag measures, personal experience as a member of a community where more conservative participants regularly have a conniption about homosexual participants not being in the closet.
I don't know why it would be expected that homophobes would pack it in after Obergefell v. Hodges or that all that sentiment would suddenly evaporate.
So like I thought, all of it are examples of recent backlash against transing kids, shoving sex stuff into schools, and treating weird pomo queer theories as fact.
That's not "in the mean time that hasn't stopped them from pursuing anti-homosexual policy and rhetoric", that's "after years of tolerance the progressive movement has pushed so far, it created a backlash".
How, exactly, is 30% of the population openly supporting a ban on gay marriage a recent backlash against trans kinds? And, again, why should we expect that all the homophobes stopped being homophobic after a supreme court case they were livid about?
What tolerance? You talk like there was some sort of settlement where homophobes agreed to tolerate gay people rather fighting it every step of the way.
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I have to admit- I just think everyone deserves support and I suspect the fight will keep going forever or until conservatives kill all the abnormal people or stop trying to bully people who want to surgically alter themselves into giant spiders out of existence.
It's not going to end because um... why should it end exactly? I have this feeling of an underlying premise that there is an amount of weird that is... too weird. And... I just... don't have that premise. If something has pragmatic issues that prevent it from being pragmatic for society to support it, my first thought is "what technological advancements will cause support of this to be viable" not "lets suppress it forever."
But some people seem to see "technical advancements have caused support for this to be viable" and go into moral panic mode. Why?
Why are some people unhappy seeing the boundaries of the human condition expand? Why does it make some people uncomfortable?
What is wrong with your brains? Or is it me? What's wrong with my brain? Something is clearly wrong with someone's brain here.
I'm not of the belief that support for abnormal people is the motivation for liberal promotion of transgender issues.
I'm of the belief that liberal's motivation is status competition with conservatives, transgendered people are just a prop liberals use towards that ends.
I'm also not of the belief that the promotion liberals engage in should count as support.
I'm largely of the belief that transgenderism is self-destruction, similar to cutting, or suicide attempts.
People who are attracted to it need empathetic treatment, not celebration.
In large part I'm quite unimpressed with the approach that most conservatives take, their approach is genuinely unhelpful. But I largely perceive them as flailing wildly at a response to a game that liberals largely initiated.
I think people living in multiculturalist cities are more likely to have weird friends who are actually observably enjoying their lives.
I think people living in other places are more likely to have weird friends living miserable lives.
Ok so- this isn't a competition but I'm curious, how many trans people do you know personally that love their lives and how many do you know personally that hate their lives, and do you live in a multicultural city or a small town?
because for me it's like- 50 to 5? And I met most of them in Berkeley, and 4 of the 5 are miserable because of lack of societal support, and the fifth is miserable because he's just miserable and lacks emotional control but still swears by his transition so- I suspect, we are living in vastly different filter bubbles, and this is responsible for our difference in views.
Your responses in this thread have been better than I deserve, thank you.
You've quite perceptively picked up that we likely have vastly different filter bubbles. You're correct that I don't live in a large city (exurb of a medium size city probably most accurately describes it). My brother, sister, sister in law and her husband all live in places that would meet any definition of large multicultural cities, and I talk and visit them all fairly regularly, so I don't think I'm totally oblivious to what at least some people's lives are like in large multicultural cities.
My exposure to trans people mostly come through 2 sources.
First, when my sister got married, her husband already had an 8 year old daughter. My new niece had a variety mental health problems, many of which she might have inherited from her biological mother who also had a variety of mental health problems. At one put she started cutting herself, there were multiple episodes where she threatened to kill herself. These episodes predate her announcing that she was transgender when she was 12.
Zhe is 15 now, and has decided that zhe is non-binary now, so I'll try to switch over to those pronouns the rest of the way.
What to make of this episode? Quite frankly, I'm hesitant to make it too much about trans people.
Not sure if you've read Scott Alexander's review of Crazy Like Us https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
In the parlance of that review, zhe had a significant amount of psychic stress, it was going to find an outlet in some manner or another.
That said, I'm unimpressed with our culture that gender confusion has become the psychic stress release valve for people such as zer.
Fwiw, zhe growing up in a large multicultural city doesn't seem disconnected from this being the valve zer psychic stress went to. The large multicultural city zhe has grown up in has a political culture where identifying as trans changes how therapists and teacher treat you in relation to your parents.
Life is confusing and full of psychic distress, for all of us, we all want validation. If you give people validation for something, people desperate for validation will be attracted to it.
Second, while physically I might be a hobbit tucked away in the shire, I'm a citizen of the internet.
I realize this sounds ridiculous.
The internet is where we are all on our worst behavior, I know all sorts of seemingly normal irl people who seem nuts when they start outputting on a keyboard.
That said, in the sea of crazy that is norm of internet interactions.
It is a distinct impression that I have that the trans community interacts in a uniquely deranged manner.
I don't have any scientific cites for you, it's just an impression I have come to.
If you imagine a community as a giant bell curve, with their median members as the big middle, their most gracious members on one end of the spectrum, their least gracious members on the other end of the spectrum.
I hope we can agree, that while there might be some gracious Trump supporters online, as a giant bell curve, the fat part in the middle of their bell curve is at a different spot than Biden supporters online.
If we can imagine different communities like that, it's my impression that the trans community is distinct from nearly any other community.
Such that the assertion that your observable ratio of trans people enjoying their lives is 50-5 kind of blows my mind.
That said, that 'there are reports that the ratio of trans people enjoying their lives off the internet is 50-5', is probably a good update on my mental model of the universe.
Thank you, I appreciate your responses in this thread, they are a useful addition to my sense-making of the universe.
Thank you too.
Hmm. This is important. I don't know what to say about it yet... might be a long time before I do.
There are a few things I suppose... this is just rubber ducking that I'm showing you because... well you spent a lot of words on your comment and I feel you should see their results:
I don't know how big of an effect this is having, but I am certain it's significant.
If people becoming trans gets them a sort of validation they are not otherwise getting, then clearly we are doing something very wrong with regards to how we are allocating validation. This is a very concerning thought but also implies alternate solutions. Big if true.
It also implies that trans people being crazy is a symptom of them being filtered into the category by forces of validation. Which means shutting down these people's transition... well certainly people who think of it as mutilation will still see it as treating the most serious symptom, but the underlying cause would go untreated, and in fact be less treated... ideally you would treat the root cause and that would reduce unnecessary transition instead.
No. I don't think this sounds ridiculous. Real life experience is important. But the internet is also important.
I think the internet exaggerates the real world a lot- and does so in an unbalanced way. For instance, people without a life are more likely to be posting on the internet all the time... and... well, your model is that the trans community is attracting people who aren't getting enough validation, so that would be an example.
but it affects the world, the world affects it, so the patterns you see on the internet always mean something, even if you can't take them quite at face value.
And some people make their living through it, and we live a lot of our lives on it.
I think we should be worried about a lot more than just liberalism or the trans community when it comes to making the internet a more free and sane place.
But problems being caused by groups on the internet are still legitimate problems, and are worth discussing.
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How I'd describe the problem, and it's one underlying your beliefs and the beliefs of your critics, is a lack of truly considering the person. The people who criticize you consider too little, you consider too much. Your critics offer no support, why would they? What they dislike is inherently wrong, why would they consider it except to explain their reasons for disapproval? You offer too much support, why wouldn't you? You see the person, you listen to what they see they need. They live their life in their own way, almost all of them are good people, why shouldn't we support them realizing themselves? Where's the cost?
What's lacking in this discussion from reactionaries (a better term than conservatives) and progressive is the judgment of the good parent. The father who sees his child abusing a drug and finds it so obviously wrong it is only right to practice the "harsh love" of stern words and refusal to understand, let alone accommodate--he lacks good judgment. The mother who sees her child abusing a drug and enables them, it's what they say they need, it makes them happy, who's she to do anything else than show unconditional love and support? She also lacks good judgment.
You could read this as weighted against the mother, so feel free to frame it as a valid prescription used to treat a real condition. But it's a medication the child is abusing. Maybe they're getting too much and sharing with their friends, maybe they're encouraging their friends to get their own prescriptions by coaching them at faking the symptoms. Not that it's particularly hard. The American medical industry is the best in the world, the treatments developed and quality of highest care truly cannot be overstated; neither can be the depravity they are willing to indulge in pursuit of profit. There is decades of evidence proving this: they might not be the bad guys, but it is empiric falsehood to suggest they could be anything better than the neutral beneficiaries of the current climate.
This is something the father would gladly cite; this is something the mother overlooks. Neither love their child as they should.
"Harsh love" is an oxymoron. The person showing "harsh love" is either not showing love at all, what you probably think of the father I've described, or they are showing love, and it only comes across as harsh because it really is love. It's deeply and truly caring for someone, caring for what's best for them, looking for what's best for them, and knowing something they're doing might be bad for them or even disastrous. It's a concept that has been difficult to understand forever, it's what Kierkegaard wrote a book about, just trying to help people get it. It's the essential idea of what Eliezer Yudkowsky worked at with his "Coherent Extrapolated Volition." The ideal AGI is one that truly loves humanity, loves us as love is meant to be. Perceptive, understanding, upbuilding. Like the good parent.
I have a good friend who identifies as trans. This is a person who until the chrysalis exists will never pass. To use the most descriptive phrase but one they would certainly dislike, they are too much man. Too tall, too strong, too hirsute. They do have a certain androgyny in the face, insofar as so masculine a person could be in any way feminine, but it is of course the sort that accentuated their handsomeness and made them highly desirable to the biological women they have exclusively dated before and after "coming out" and beginning chemical therapy. They were told a lie by whoever first suggested they might be trans, that was a lie perpetuated to them as they fell deeper into those communities and as they specifically, and they said as much, looked for the right therapist in town: just a glorified prescription mill. That therapist wasn't doing their job, the people encouraging my friend weren't acting as friends should. They were lied to, they were told this is right. They were told this is how you support people. They don't know what's right, they don't know how to support people. They don't know what good is, they don't know what love is.
It isn't love to believe that a condition in the black box of the human brain, a condition novel within popular knowledge and largely in medical treatment, has already been cured. Humans are diverse, there are without question individuals who truly suffer from symptoms accurately described when called "gender dysphoria." Who when prescribed cross-sex hormones, who when pursuing major cosmetic surgeries to accentuate or minimize desired and undesired features, who change their names and their wardrobes and are treated as they identify, experience an abatement in those symptoms with minimal or no other psychiatric comorbidities.
There are in ever-increasing numbers individuals with serious mental illness who self-attest to gender dysphoria and are treated accordingly, as if that is the issue with them. Like my friend. My friend doesn't fall under what was once well-known in psychiatry as the "homosexual transsexual," my friend is not actually trans. Their mental illness has nothing to do with the gender dysphoria they believe they have, this is why they still struggle with it. I love my friend but not enough, I wish I loved them enough, to tell them this when they came out. To criticize what they believe they are, to appropriately indict their supposed "friends", myself now damn well included, who encouraged them or said nothing. I "supported" them and they aren't any better, and at this point I'm just hoping that when the dissonance becomes too great and finally shatters their years of rationalization, they don't commit suicide.
As you describe yourself, you would be encouraging of them. You'd be one of the ones telling a mountain of a man how the world is wrong, how the structures of man can be ignored, how we can assert the reality we wish. How he really can be a woman, we just have to force everyone to pretend hard enough. You're "supporting" his dream that for now cannot possibly be realized. And if he really does have gender dysphoria, if all his issues really are about how he was born in the wrong body, I still ask what love are you showing for the person who cannot pass when you encourage him to become something that people have a million years of evolutionary wiring conditioning them to find irreconcilably freakish?
You're not showing any. You think you are because you don't know better.
There is something we both believe. Eventually the chrysalis will exist and a man will be able to climb inside and emerge, at least superficially, as a seamless and beautiful woman. Where it'll take a DNA test or CT, if even that and surely eventually not, to be found as originally male. Where we diverge is this: you think this moment will be the great and final realization of the trans movement while I understand it will be what buries it forever.
I always caveat myself on this subject, "I don't care." You can see above how I obviously care some but I feel describing as apathetic is still closer to the truth because what side am I, exactly? I consider a lot of the discussion here on trans-advocacy as pointless, the matters settled. Short of a dark reactionary taking power, the movement isn't going away. Best learn to live with it because that's the future. But in the future, when pharmaceuticals have advanced enough to do wild things to the human body, where we can make ourselves look almost exactly as we like, we'll see the truth. We'll see so many people who believed all their problems would be solved if they could take a magic pill and wake up as an ideal form of their desired sex will do that and still have problems. It'll work for some, as experiencing the most drastic change in lifestyle possible means even those with a variety of mental issues may find their strange new reality a cure-all, but you'll see so many stories about people who discovered how fulfilling everything they thought they wanted didn't solve the problems inside their head.
It'll be sooner than that. With the rates of kids having delayed puberty and altered puberty for identified gender, combined with advances in cosmetic surgery, novel tissue generation and implantation, the various tech being explored right now to change how voices sound, we're approaching a point where there are going to be many people who pass seamlessly enough as the sex they thought they were. Probably not 5 years, 10, 15 at the most, and those stories will come pouring out.
"It's not what was wrong with me. I wish the people who pushed me into it, or who helped me along, thinking they were loving me, thinking they were supporting me, knew better."
Love is making it hard but not impossible for people to follow this life path. Love is not cruel dismissal and hatred. Love is accepting some people really are this way and and supporting them. Love is also understanding how we do not know how the brain works and so we will not indulge the I-cannot-modify-enough, the astonishingly unparalleled, sheer fucking hubris of unquestioningly believing the cure has already been found. Love is exhausting every option before extreme body modification becomes the chosen path. Love is putting every physician and therapist who treats this and absolutely the pharma that makes money from this under the largest lens to ensure they aren't abusing and unrighteously profiting from their position. Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there. Love is knowing "This is who I am" is not a magic phrase, it's knowing people get things wrong, especially when it comes to themselves. Love isn't blindly supporting what a person thinks is best for themselves, it's knowing and standing firm on what's actually best for them. Love is the good parent.
Would you see this as a preferred outcome?
You have to be the change you want to see.
the preferred outcome is whatever allows the tech i describe to develop uninterrupted. that tech is connected with advancing human simulacra, and simulacra will probably be the key to keeping humanity from destroying itself long enough for us to develop the further necessary tech to pass through the great filter.
This is a fascinating thought, would love to hear a fuller explanation in another post.
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I don't have much to say to this because I agree with too much of it.
Bury is a strange word to use but yes. There will be no movement after that. There will just be people whose problems were solved by the chrysalis and people who learned that they had a different problem that the chrysalis failed to solve. When transformation is trivial it becomes the diagnosis.
But I also agree that transformation is not trivial today. It is a process with costs. You say I consider the person too much. But what you describe is a scenario where I consider what they say, but still fail to see them. Until the chrysalis is a trivial procedure... I agree. The person needs to be understood in full. But this is not easy. For someone to be seen they have to be known and loved. And the person who sees them needs to have insight that exceeds that of what even they know of themselves. Or able to guide them through unraveling and exploring their own motivations and experiences.
We need more passive mentors with more time and more insight than what many parents are de facto able to provide.
I am compelled again to stop posting and continue working on my assistant. We don't need AGI for this. AI should suffice.
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"Support" is doing a lot of lifting here. Should we not execute people who want to turn themselves into spiders? sure. Should we let them eat children because that's what spiders of their size would do? absolutely not. And I think a lot of people reasonable draw the line at "Anything that is going to impose a neg negative cost on society"
What do you mean by a net negative cost on society?
Eating children sure. But that's a toy example. Where is the edge?
What happens when people are just afraid of spiders?
At some point, society isn't compatible with things- not because there's anything wrong with those things in and of themselves, but because society is being inflexible in ways it could change.
I think in cases like these, it's still reasonable... realistic... rational... perhaps even economically optimal in the short term to be antispider.
But it's braver to recognize that you're the one causing their existence to be a negative and try to change.
There are some cost inherent to accommodating extremely strange expressed desires. "normal" existing at all as a concept has some strong net positive effect because people who might think turning themself into a spider will make them happier are often just wrong. Normalizing such a thing makes it more likely marginal people might try. If we're going to start saying we should be concerned with the wellbeing of others to the degree we're trading off on our own preferences then we ought to actually also consider the second and third order effects.
We are talking about a world where you can turn into a giant spider right?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're biologically immortal.
So strong disagreement. Exploration is far more important to an immortal society than exploitation. You have forever to figure out what you like most. So you SHOULD try out being a giant spider. Trying out everything should be normalized.
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Part of it isn't even moral, it's frustration that the majority of Team Progress is nowhere near as forthright as you are, and are swearing up and down that the giant spider thing is never going to happen.
As to the rest, it's a bit hard to explain when our moral worldviews are so different, but in a nutshell your approach to life would render it pointless to us, and it's equally weird to me that you can't grok at all where we're coming from. When you see people hiking up a mountain, do you also think "those fucking morons could have taken the cable car!"?
No. I think enjoying the hike is neat. I also think enjoying the cable car is neat. I also think enjoying the experience of being a fly and laying eggs in a carcass would be neat.
If the concern is that your way of life will be eradicated, that's understandable, but if your concern is that your children might not choose the same way of life as you if given the choice...
Well... I guess... I sortof get that? It's just... It feels like the empire of Mankind in 40k. Treating everything that isn't human like a resource or an enemy or an infection. Being proud to be human isn't bad but- does that have to mean you have to prevent others from choosing to be a fly? Do some people just find... such an inherent lack of meaning in anything else to the point of wanting to treat it like atoms that could be used to make more humans? Like all humans are just bodies for holding their culture? Or like their children are just bodies for holding their culture? Are some people really just humanclippers? christianclippers?
I can understand the premise. I have a primal, echoing understanding of the premise. I just don't want to assume something so totalizing. I don't think most conservatives feel like that. It's just... a primal terror. The thought that most people might actually be such totalizing existences that they would leave the cosmos just as empty as it is today. Merely tiled with the same thing over and over.
What do you value?
Diversity and exploration. Curiosity bordering on aspirations of omniscience.
Ease of dancing through state-space. Mapping qualiaspace. Intimacy with the Other.
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Does pedophilia get the benefits of this expansion? What if you get the kids to consent to it?
Do you think encouraging children to engage in recreational use of heroin or methamphetamines is a good idea? If not, why not? Wouldn't this just be allowing them the freedom to make their own decisions about their own brain chemistry?
Like, I understand that dropping the pedo card is generally considered bad form. But you're the one saying letting people do what they want expands without limit. I don't think you actually mean that, because there are some very obvious limits I don't think you will, now at least, actually endorse! But you are emphatically saying those limits don't exist, so it seems necessary to point them out explicity.
So which is it? Do you actually recognize that some decisions, even personal decisions, should be restricted, or are you committed to "anything goes"?
The conservative position is that people are not, in fact, infinitely malleable, and pretending they are, or allowing them to pretend they are, can have serious consequences both for those people and for society as a whole. We can point to a long serious of fairly heinous consequences over the course of history to back this idea up.
[EDIT] - Would it be fair to say that you see gratification of one's desires as a terminal good? Would it also be fair to say that, excepting desires that clearly harm another, you don't believe there's such a thing as a bad desire?
I think there are better conservative positions, like- "we're not ready for this- yet. And won't be in our lifetimes so give up on it."
The conservative position that humans are not infinitely malleable is... either intended in the context of our lifetimes or just ridiculously shortsighted. We evolved from single celled organisms and we'll do it again.
Social progress is the ongoing process of distilling the baby out of the bathwater. Separating good from evil, and adopting the good while negating and subverting the evil.
I'm not saying everything should be permitted now. Far from it.
"Which technological advancements will make pedophilia viable?"
Well. Better systems to make sure they never fuck actual children.
Deepfaking technology.
Android technology.
Viability timeline estimation - 100 years
Will they ever be allowed to fuck actual children?
"Which technological advancements will make adults having intercourse with children viable?"
Very difficult to say. The costs are too high to explore...
the costs... are too high... to explore...
Absurdly predictive theory of child development and trauma formation.
Much better trauma treatment in cases where things go wrong, to the point that there are no known cases of even illegal violent rape that leave residual trauma after a week.
Enough supervision that every instance can be monitored even as it becomes socially normalized.
Viability timeline estimation - 1000 years or post singularity equivalent.
...
Will there even be human children in 1000 years or will pedophilia just mean intercourse with day old AI forks? Is sexting a fresh LLM instance pedophilia? Nah. Nah the concept just falls apart at that point. It's like asking ChatGPT whether its a man or a woman.
[EDIT] regarding your edit.
I think desires can be conditionally bad, but not innately bad. But this is usually a moot point. We live in conditions after all.
Having a strong, debilitating desire to be a squid as a 16th century peasant is not very useful, and you should work towards mitigating that until it is not debilitating and accept that you are probably going to be a human your whole life. Though- it would be fine to also accept that you still have the desire, if you can channel it to something tangible. Maybe that peasant becomes a famous squid painter. Maybe he just makes his family just a little richer through hard work so that maybe his children can follow their dreams one day.
It would be more accurate to say- my desire is to see humanity moving with the intention of shifting conditions so that more and more desires are supported, and fewer and fewer desires are bad.
It's less about the gratification of desires and more about them not being frustrated as they unspool into acts of creation that give birth to intense and unique existences and experiences.
There is a sort of desire that becomes a religion. A driving need. A purpose. I don't know how many people have even experienced what I'm talking about. It's difficult to describe because thinking about it is placing me in an intense state of... blissful thirst for new sensations. I need to go.
What evidence can you offer that you in particular or Social Progressivism generally has any fixed definition of "good" or "evil", "baby" or "bathwater"? If, as seems obvious to me, you have no such fixed definition, what do these statements even mean?
Why not? How do we adjudicate which changes can be permitted now and which later?
You're reducing the problem to one of logistics. But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future. Why should I believe that Social Progress will confine itself to thoroughly tested and engineered solutions when it has never done so before?
And this ignores the question of whether it really is just a question of logistics. What if they really, really want to fuck kids, for real, and are not satisfied with your simulacra? In that eventuality, on what basis do you deny their deeply-held, arguably-innate desires? What if they promise to only fuck the kids they clone and grow themselves?
How do you even know their desires are wrong? On what basis? Because "studies show"?
Based on what, your opinion? People like me tell you that [$thing] has a cost too high to explore, and you laugh us off and explore the fuck out of it anyway, and then expect your own pronouncements to be treated as holy writ? Progressives disagreed with your opinion in the past, and actively encouraged and enabled pedophilia through the power of the state, because they knew better and "studies showed". Do you have some radical new insight that they somehow missed the last go-round?
...Rather than go point by point, let me try to draw this together: you talk as though there is an obvious good and evil, an obvious moral standard of correctness. You reject my claim to possess such a standard out of hand, and then you presume that your preferred standard is simply, obviously correct and needs no further justification. You do this in apparent blissful ignorance of the heaps of skulls previously generated by exactly the attitude you're currently displaying.
You frame the concepts of drift-of-form and drift-of-values in the most anodyne ways possible, ignoring all the obvious, glaring pitfalls, as though it's all about body-shape and inside we're of course all be true-blue (Berkeley progressive circa 2023) Americans. What if I decide I don't like having a conscience? What if I want to bake hatred of [$group] into myself on a genetic level, so I can pass it on to my kids? What if I want to self-modify to reverse my empathy so that observed injustice gives me orgasmic pleasure? What if the giant spider morph wants to eat children? What if trans surgery doesn't actually help and is actually mutilation? What if marketing heroin to kids is super-profitable and highly effective? What if the definition of human shifts, and some former persons don't make the cut (60 million abortions and counting, government-sponsored ads for Euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure)? What if it turns out some sector of the population is, like, really harshing your vibe, man?
What if, in short, the line between good and evil really does run through every human heart, and solving hatred and malice and greed and the urge to predation is not just a matter of engineering everybody into a sim-pod?
...And of course, all this is done, ignoring the fact that right now we don't have the tech, and you're arguing in favor of the people who push the "start" button anyway.
And the idea that these mostly-fictional or literally unimaginable desires might be frustrated weighs on your moral thinking, such that you're willing to assist in the radical, arguably-coercive restructuring of a society built and largely peopled by individuals who have no idea what the fuck you're on about, but are not interested in what you're selling? Like, Progressives collectively make this pitch, I and people like me say, "fuck no", and you try to push us into the hopper anyway? That about the size of it?
Have you considered that maybe you just have a fetish for novelty?
Arguably coercive? My friend. We live in a society. It's always been coercive. You see progressives say that they want more diverse sets of people to be permitted to exist, and conservatives say they want to be allowed to force people to all fit a certain mold, and you call the former coercive?
Very well. It may well be. We live in a society until the day we are all so powerful that we no longer need to and can live in deep intergalactic space off the skin of our hydrogen collectors. But don't tell me the society crafted by our forefathers isn't just as coercive if not moreso.
Holy writ? No not by everyone. I expect combat. I expect culture war. I would prefer a peaceful unfolding. But I am here to change the world. Not to coddle it.
I don't expect- I think our world is built up from the tragedies of the violent birth of our species into a hostile world. Our precedents are the sacrifices we have made to keep ourselves alive. And even thinking about it costs energy. Costs scarce resources. Time spent arguing over whether it is time to remove Chesterton's fence is time not spent growing food. The legal system costs millions of dollars and the time of our best and brightest just to print and execute precedent at a grueling rate. I get that it's not cheap. I get that it has value that we have paid dearly for.
But- this is probably because I am an American born in the Live Free or Die state. But I expect people to not terminally value fences- to merely instrumentally value them. Even though I do understand- you can terminally value just about anything.
What I want... I want people to have... reasons beyond inertia or precedent for why things are bad. I want people to actually be interested in understanding why Chesterton's fence is there, and remain aware of when it can, or should be torn down. They don't have to be objectively correct. I don't expect all humans to have the same understanding of good and evil or the same predictions of the consequences of actions. I just want everyone to remain aware and humor the idea that there is a point at which we outgrow the fences we have erected for our safety. I want people to imagine when tearing it down would be viable, so that they can give one another firm expectations of what they have to build if they really need it torn down. If the suppression of trans people and enforcement of gender norms hadn't been so coercive, if conservatives could have made some compromises and set firm expectations for what trans people have to do before they're allowed to remove that fence-
If we had been cooperating on this from the start with clear expectations then this culture war never would have happened.
Of course this is a fantasy. Our history didn't build us up as people who could have cooperated like that.
Skulls? I have seen millennia of skulls. Skulls of the strange and the outliers. Skulls of the weird slaughtered in the name of conformity to make sure food could be grown. Are we simply looking at different skull piles here? I get that sometimes, when the weird grow in power, walking off the beaten path, the food stops getting made, and the skulls become myriad. I am told "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". And I agree, but I also contend- "Do not let the good be the enemy of the better."
Morality? Everyone has one. Get yours now. 50% off. If you don't like having a conscience get rid of it. Don't worry. I won't get rid of mine. If you hurt someone I'll just kill you. If you can erase your conscience without doing that- or want to die- go for it. That's not a threat. It's more... this all just seems so simple to me. We are all here. Just don't let go of the parts you want to keep and they'll stick around. Yes. It doesn't escape me that conservatives are doing the same thing- to a degree. I can appreciate that trans people may have pushed too deeply too quickly for systems to adapt. I can appreciate that where exactly I draw the line is somewhat arbitrary, that some people might not want to let go of the gender binary for reasons more terminal in addition to the pragmatic. But my concern is more the lack of interest some people have in letting the systems ever change to support more types of people. Some people don't seem to be looking for how the world can become better, they are only looking at how the world can become worse.
I have a fetish for novelty. Definitely. Novelty and intensity. Glory, expression, fire, intensity, fearlessness.
Ah, yes. perhaps I do expect other humans to at least taste a hint of why those things are good. Even if they weigh them against other values.
I think conservatives have a fetish for safety. I think many of them have very reasonable takes around safety and sustainability. But I think some of them have a fear-driven blindness to almost everything else that makes the universe wonderful. I think conservatives, as the leaders on caring about safety and sustainability- should have been the ones thinking about global warming. Not necessarily cutting emissions earlier- there were real economic tradeoffs there that merited consideration. But actually recognizing and thinking about the problem. But instead it was fully denied because of the implication that we might have to change the way we live our lives over it. Something has gone horribly wrong- when precedent is the thing blinding us to the safety it was built for. When safety is the thing stopping us from living the lives it was built to preserve.
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To me, this seems backwards. For as much of a difference there is between our single celled ancestors and homo sapiens, the differences between them are not infinite. In fact, compared to infinite differences, the 2 might as well be identical, as hard to distinguish from each other as distinguishing one electron from another. And infinite malleability would require infinite time (or being able to do things in infinitely short amount of time). Not small beans like "until all usable energy in the universe is lost to entropy" - in comparison to infinite time, that might as well be a nanosecond. Otherwise, just from the simple math of a finite number of humans doing things in a finite amount of time, the malleability of humans can't be infinite.
If you're merely using hyperbolic language, then it's just a question of where one draws the line in terms of how malleable humans are. But then the question becomes more nuanced and hinges on the specifics, of course.
...
Sure. I think there are limits to the diversity mathematics can express given a finite universe or effectively finite universe given speed of light restrictions.
But like- I think we are like ants in a terrarium. We have explored a single drop in the ocean of possibilities. There are game theoretic considerations that will probably hold across all agents, but the things that are obviously bad for humans right now are not obviously universally bad in all possible situations.
I think if you want to argue that humans are not infinitely malleable "arbitrarily large is not infinity" is... technically correct. But of no use to the conservative.
I would expect them to go for "that's not human" instead.
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Look, there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes she doesn’t feel like polishing your spear.
Anyway. Let’s imagine that your enemies aren’t purely cynical operators, scrounging for facts to hold up their worldview. Can you think of a principle that might lead to similar conclusions? A reason to decide that both gay and trans people deserve support?
Wild. Well, only half, apparently. Which raises some other questions about what she means by “other contexts.”
I think your construction is a much more realistic principle. Centering conservatives doesn’t match the way people justify progressivism. Underdog support might not be specific enough, though. It’s a popular tack across societies.
The pre-war Progressives campaigned for collective (government) action against business interests and entrenched politics. Communism attempted to harness underdogs via class consciousness. Postmodernists asked whether the narratives and structures underpinning the modern world had any rational basis, or were merely fictions. There was always an idea that the underdogs were temporarily embarrassed millionaires. More importantly, there was an excuse for any non-embarrassed millionaire to remain a good leftist, so long as he or she was awoken to the plight of the underdog.
Strategically speaking, this is very useful. It also suggests a broader progressive principle: one’s circle of concern can (and should) be very large. Race, creed, nation are not supposed to be barriers to empathy. “Workers of the world, unite.”
But that phrase retains one caveat, because no ideology survives if it cannot defend itself. A hostile ideology is the one remaining target for discrimination. For the Soviets this was nominally decided by class. Modern progressivism updates it to account for a more liberal concept of free will. The circle of concern does not have to include those who have chosen to reject it.
That caveat is what sneaks in most of the modifiers and exceptions. It’s defensible on classical-liberal grounds, which makes it very familiar for Americans and our cultural umbrella. I think this definition—a broad but selective circle of concern—best fits the modern progressive philosophy.
You're probably right. "Underdog" does a better job of covering the nominal choice for power dynamics. For making predictions about who gets the benefit of the doubt. The "circle of concern" covers a lot of the ifs/ands/buts, though it is not unique to progressivism.
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...But then you are forced, if you are honest, to admit that you are not in fact doing anything fundamentally different than the system you've replaced. You haven't actually made a world without discrimination, only changed who gets discriminated against. All the same postmodern and materialist and nihilist critiques apply equally as well to your new system as they did to the old one, and your values are exactly as arbitrary and ultimately pointless.
And once you've admitted that, we can agree that you have nothing to offer but might makes right, foreclose the moral arguments, and get down to the mightying.
Perhaps.
Theories derived from liberalism do tend to pick up speed until they hit the ski ramp that is “coercion.”
There is a loophole. Should everyone choose progressivism, the circle gets to cover all of them. No discrimination necessary. Also, poverty and violence are ended forever, and the Age of Aquarius is upon us. We did it, Reddit.
I assume most every American thinks something similar about their ingroup, mind you. It’s the natural intersection of tribalism with our civic religion. And tribalism is really, really adaptive. The catch is that cooperating in this game has huge advantages. There is an equilibrium where progressives tear themselves apart trying to draw a very careful circle of concern. Call me an optimist, I guess.
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I think it’s because they’re useful in several ways to the regime.
As symbols, they can serve as useful tools of the elite trying to convince other people to join the Atlantic Empire. After all, if we can tolerate transpeople, accepting Muslims, Buddhists and so on isn’t an issue. You can be free to do anything, and we aren’t going to stop you. Hell, we’ll force it including forcing companies to hire you and cater to you.
As a bloc, they are fanatic defenders of the elite, because the elite are allowing them to punch far above their weight. If the Atlantic Empire falls, they’re toast, as no other potential elites (MAGA, BRIC, Islamic, or Christian National) will give them the same deal. In fact, absent a strong champion, they probably can’t gain enough power to defend themselves, and aren’t good workers in most situations.
As a distraction, they allow the regime to do as it pleases in other spheres of control. As long as we’re talking about trans people reading books to kids, Dylan Mulvaney, and pro-trans propaganda in schools, the ability for the government to quietly sneak in and change other things, to take control over privacy and so on is high.
You don't even need a "distraction for the elites": the trans acceptance movement is not a distraction for the coup, it is the coup.
Just think about what it does to parental rights if not affirming some utterly unfalsifiable religious belief with serious potential health consequences can lead to the removal of your child or the usurpation of your role as parent by some overeducated government employee with a graduate degree.
I see that point as well.
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I'm convinced the reason trans people occupy such a large space in the cultural imagination relative to the size of their demographic (and are able to get their demands met so easily) is simply because a disproportionately large number of coders in Silicon Valley are trans women.
That could explain other things too, like why the furry community has a significant number of people and why furries have so much disposable income. I've seen many jokes about how if there was a plane full of furries, and it crashed, killing everyone on board, the tech infrastructure in America would crumble soon afterward.
If it's the plane out of a gathering, I found the way I want to go out.
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Or it’s simply because of toxoplasmosis of rage. Liberals pushing for polyamory doesn’t get the same reaction, so there’s less attention drawn to it, so less resources go into promoting it. Trans, well, just took $26 billion off the market cap for the largest beer company in the country(world?).
Yeah, it's hard to see "it's the beer for bigamists" generating anywhere near the hatred, at the present time anyway.
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Coders are low status, so that's not it.
It's probably the same phenomenon that leads to, for instance, white people who run universities declaring that they live on stolen land. I guarantee you that this has nothing to do with a disproportionately large number of Native Americans being at the university.
They may be low-status in society at large, and yet still wield power and influence within tech companies.
Imagine a social media company drawing up their policy on hate speech, and they get pressured into making transphobia (however defined) a bannable offense - because a number of their senior coders/software architects/designers/whatever are trans, and threaten to resign in protest if they don't implement this policy. The social media company may do this not out of a sincere belief that transphobia is wrong but just for fear of losing key talent - but the end users of the social media platform will likely interpret it to mean "this social media platform thinks that transphobia is a sin on a par with racism" and update their beliefs accordingly. If something like this happens independently in enough tech companies, you end up with widespread institutional opposition to transphobia even if most people in the society don't agree with said opposition.
As to the object-level question of whether trans people are overrepresented in tech, the closest I could find to hard numbers was this https://abcnews.go.com/Business/transgender-tech-visibility-obstacles-remain/story?id=76374628
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So? I'm sorry, sure, elites and politicians do a have disproportionate cultural impact. But I would expect the people who build all of the technology that runs your life and live next to the people who make your movies and work for the billionaires paying into your charities to also have some effect. Regardless of what effect society thinks they should have. Coders are low status yes. Because status doesn't effect how good the code you write is (well it does but mostly your status among other coders. Where the trans people who make it to silicon valley tend to be relatively high status.)
This is why trans people become coders. Because it's a form of power that tends to focus less on existing status structures and builds new ones instead.
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Lots of the people pushing that one are actually 1/32 Cherokee and trying to use it to their advantage, though.
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Seems to be the SSC idea of ideas as soldiers, just translated into this sphere. If you flood the space with genius black trans guys people will accept all the other crazy leftist ideas, because that is clearly the craziest.
Why? Why is that clearly the craziest?
What about genius black trans guy makes any statistical sense? Blacks are the least likely to be genius or trans. If you depict that on TV and portray it in a movie, then once some accepts that concept, something as bland a a gay commie trying to confiscate your guns is bland.
Black Americans are trans at a higher rate than White. There are still fewer of them, total, I guess? Definitely not the “least likely,” which would go to “Other” Americans.
I feel like you’re tilting at windmills here. Who’s this gun-hating gay commie, exactly? Buttigieg?
It was an example of how extremes shift things. But sure, Barnie Frank is a gay gun hating commie.
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I doubt he'll actually enforce this, it's just another funny Musk thing on twitter. Like when trump says he would've invaded venezuela for oil, that doesn't mean anything, he's just saying something he thinks people will react to
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How often do you see the word 'cis' used in a positive context? I'm not even talking about the dismissive 'They're just a cis gendered ... ' that is prevalent on parts of the internet. When have you heard someone say something like 'I'm happy I'm cis'?
Considering how it's used (for the most part) and the fact that it is a label applied to people who didn't choose it (for the most part); I don't see why people would want to be called cis.
My usual phrasing is ‘I am preferentially (as opposed to apathetically) cisgender.’ Which means, yeah, I’m cisgender and happy about it. Happy to say so anytime :)
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Never. But I wanted to be a bit less anecdotal and a bit more charitable in my top-level comment.
That's fair, I respect that.
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Being charitable to attackers is being uncharitable to targets.
It seems you have rediscovered the principle pushed by Ibram X. Kendi and company that there is no such thing as being neutral and by being neutral you are siding with the oppressor.
If one side is actually in the wrong, and the other actually is in the right, attempting to find a middle ground is in fact ceding justice to the unjust. This doesn't apply if the rightness and wrongness of the parties is actually in question. The problem with Kendi isn't that he labels people oppressors, it's that he does so based on no reasonable foundation. Here, the foundation has already been ceded.
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"Charitable" is not the same as neutral.
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The whole ethos of this forum is to be charitable and assume the best form of your opponent's argument, regardless of how wrong you imagine it/they might be. In the interest of avoiding the easy construction of strawman arguments.
I think you're describing an extreme example, where whoever it is you might be arguing with produces only incomprehensible babble or wild contortions of logic. I'd need a specific example to decide whether I agree with you that in such a case any charitable interaction would be pointless. I would also suggest it is very easy to simply dismiss one's interlocutor/opponent as beyond hope/nuts/irrational, having "no steelman" version, because then no effort need be spent trying to imagine his or her POV.
Steelmanning as I understand it does not mean constructing an elaborate facade of reasonable, fact-based arguments on behalf of your opponent, where you must engage in mental contortionism and grant them every concession--or "accept" their assumptions, as you've phrased it. It simply means making (or assuming) the clearest best form of their argument--which you can then refute.
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hence the Quokka meme that is so richly deserved in the rat community.
Haven't you heard, the new meme animal is the Lemur, the one who lurks.
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afik he is referring to the dm feature or tagging someone, not use of the word in general .
I agree, contrary to the outrage of many on Twitter. With the context, he clearly says it in relation to targeted harassment. That's why he himself said "cis" without censoring it.
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Not wanting to be called something is a weaker categorization, I think intention makes for a stronger one, because the behavior we are interested in correcting is that of the offender.
I legitimately don't get this impression. It seems to me that the intention is precisely to illustrate that the category can be bigger that it currently is. I'm sure there are people who unironically think that Trans women are the ONLY women, but that's an absurdly rare position, one that is hardly endorsed even by the most "woke".
The only correct take:
The parent tweet to that one seems to be taking a different, but also funny, take: The trad position should be that trans women are women, since what kind of person would consider a trans woman to be manly.
Speaking of which, this has become less joke and more reality on the progressive edge.
This in particular:
I think Johns Hopkins has taken it down since then, though, for obvious reasons.
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The trad position would be that trans women are eunuchs or adolescent boys.
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Somebody on the Internet says "please don't call me X". Then people who don't like him start calling him X. This event has nothing to do with whether X is a "slur" -- I could be dogpiled after asking not to be called bald or a gamer and that wouldn't makes those words a slur, since "gamer" or "bald" are not normally used to insult people.
If your primary exposure to the word "cis" is that somebody is trying to insult you, then I suspect you've primarily been exposed to the worst actors of the progressive movement (and/or people who are just trying to trigger you specifically). I know multiple people who walked in the BLM protests and it's implausible to me that any of them would use "cis" or "straight" as insults (if nothing else, remember that most progressives are cis and straight).
(I won't comment on whether "cis" is usually used as an insult on Twitter, since I haven't had the misfortune of wading into culture war topics on Twitter).
I don't think "forcing 99% of the population to use a qualifier" is a good description of the culture-waring here -- it feels pretty post-hoc, since if the change was going in the opposite direction, we'd see the same amount of pushback. Suppose Americans had been using "cis women" for the last 100 years and progressives started complaining that they should just say "woman" to refer to biological women so that transwomen aren't constantly reminded that they're not cis. I'm skeptical that conservatives would be happily on board.
I think the much simpler explanation is that there are two enemy tribes who disagree on a topic and Tribe A wants to change language related to that topic. That change could be 100% innocuous and Tribe B is still gonna fight against it.
There are surely details specific to the "cis woman" debate that are relevant (e.g. some people have strong opinions on concrete policy changes like "who is allowed in a woman's shelter"), but I really don't think "you're not thinking of me as normal" is significant driver of conservative pushback.
What's the "else" to that "if"? I have been primarily exposed to the worst actors of the progressive movement, but not exclusively exposed to them. Who is using "cis" in a positive or even neutral way?
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Shouldn't Tribe B have a say in this? Especially the language change largely affects Tribe B.
This is a cop-out. From what I've seen (I'm not cit), it's not a positive word in queer circles.
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That is not the same sort of claim, and I can't think of a normal usage when a normative condition requires a special qualifier, rather than the qualifier being reserved for the abnormal minority.
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I mean, possibly. But it turns out all the worst actors of the progressive movement are moderators in most communities people try to interact with. So perhaps you can admit their impact might be outsized compared to their numbers.
If progressives don't like them being so visible and representative, perhaps they should do something about that. Otherwise, I assume these people have progressive's consent when they speak, and take action, in their name.
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The "assigned at birth" is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp. It applies to intersex babies because assigning them a gender is a pragmatic approach to an imperfect world that doesn't make accommodations for intersex individuals. Trans adults weren't assigned a gender, their sex was observed. They want to retcon the idea that sex and gender are the same thing in this instance and in this narrow interpretation because it serves their ends to conflate this aspect of intersex conditions with transgenderism. They want the right to edit their documentation. That's all. If you ask them if sex and gender are the same things in a broader interpretation of an other instance that would nullify a transgender identity they'll deny it. It's a waste of brain cells to think it through. Does editing their documentation render them the other sex, or even the other gender? No. It's just another point in their fuzzy cloud of subjective signifiers that conveniently proofs (sic) that they always were what they became (because that's what they want to be (...which they weren't (...)).
We could talk about cars the same way. There are right hand drive and left hand drive, and there are converted handed cars. Intersex are like a single-seater - they don't get to drive down the centre line and they don't compare to either handed type. Typical handed cars have no use for the handed conversion, the qualifying prefix, or the need to edit or amend their paperwork unless they're being transported to a country where they drive on the other side. Editing the paperwork doesn't mean the car has or hasn't been converted or has or hasn't come from another country. It's a fiction, and a fiction that is only worth pursuing for the convenience of the car owner. The single-seater faces no such issues. It wasn't made with mandated lanes in mind. It was assigned a lane, not a side for the steering wheel. No paperwork is going to make it more or less suited to one lane or the other or reassign something that wasn't there to be assigned. (This analogy is not great and so I won't defend it but I've spent the brain cells on writing it now and it serves the point: the mandated lane is not the steering wheel's position, some tiny number of cars don't embody those organising principles, and the documentation is not the car).
That's actually a pretty good analogy for how you're using it. Well done!
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Is "straight" a slur? "Able-bodied"? "Neurotypical"? Those, like "cis", are all neutral valance ways of describing a person as normal along some axis. I'm guessing you're disagreeing that "cis" is neutral valance?
(This isn't even getting into people accurately described as such not wanting to be called "criminal", "con man", etc., and us not calling those slurs.)
Unequivocally yes. They are all words meant to denigrate and marginalize normal people. You can tell because they are all synonymous with normal. They only reason they exist is because gays, cripples, and retards wanted a word other than normal to refer to normal people, so they don't have to be reminded how abnormal they are every time they want to talk about normal people. Hence, cis, straight, able-bodied, neurotypical, and so on right up until you get people unironically using words like cisheteropatriarchy.
This comment has accrued enough user reports for "antagonism" that I feel like I have to say something, but I admit I'm torn. What you've written is blunt enough that it could probably do with less heat, but you are answering a direct question in a clear, honest, and direct way, demonstrating good adherence to the "speak plainly" rule. But you have accrued several warnings and a ban in the last six months, which weighs against you here and increases my suspicion that you are pressing on boundaries just to see what you can get away with.
On balance, I'm issuing you a warning, but at the same time I think it would be fair to note that if a regular user with a couple of AAQCs had posted this exact comment, I would probably let it slide. Please work on making comments that are far from the edge, before seeing how close you can get to it.
I'm not trying to get close to the edge, I'm just being honest, earnest, and straightforward while spending enough pixels to avoid being called low effort.
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Neurotypical was invented as the inverse of "autistic". Some autistics are, to use the old word, "morons", but over half aren't (I'm autistic and have IQ 130). It's one thing to use slurs, but is it so much to ask that you use accurate ones?
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The only one of those that has a negative connotation to me is the last one. The first seems neutral-sounding, and the second positive.
Cis also sounds mildly negative. Both cis and neurotypical would sound more neutral if they're being used that way for clarity's sake. It depends on context to some extent, as all word use does.
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That's interesting because "neurotypical" I thought to be genuinely merely descriptive.
I'm beginning to believe that anyone who pays close enough attention to politics can't actually approach these things as JAQ neutral liberal. Before you can sincerely suggest X is descriptive, someone will convincingly tell you that term has already been weaponized and is not just descriptive.
Those who lament the hijacking of liberalism are forced to participate in such hijacking lest they show themselves to be rubes who just fell off the proverbial turnip truck.
Anyone approaching politics in a "descriptive, neutral" way is a con artist or a moron.
“Neurotypical” used to exclusively mean without neurological structural differences from the norm, ie, without autism, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, and anything else identified as being physical, not chemical.
It was adopted by the bipolar community, among others, creating a neuro-atypical disability pride community which now includes every emotional disturbance and memetic misconfiguration, including the dysphorias and dysmorphias.
“Neurotypical” is now used as an insult for “people who don’t know what it’s like to be us.” It’s another power-critical term intended to make “normal” unutterable without a sense of guilt.
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So how do you refer to someone who’s straight, but in a wheelchair? Or a cis autistic person? You can be “normal” in one axis but not another. Surely it’s handy to have a word that refers to the default attribute?
If you feel denigrated being called straight, do you also feel denigrated being called right handed (assuming you are)? Or would you want to be called normal handed?
To me your argument just sounds like the same language policing that the left is oft guilty of, but with a right wing flavour.
I want to be called dextrous, and left handed people should be called sinister.
I jest, but the fact that those words have those connotations indicates that that kind of thinking was likely in use at one point.
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I don't see why the first can't be referred to as "wheelchair user" and the second as "autistic person". There is a convention in communication where if you leave out an attribute, it is assumed to be normal, or at the very least, not currently relevant to the conversation. Especially since "wheelchair user" does not necessarily mean that they are not straight and "autistic person" does not necessarily mean that they are trans.
This is very different from "cis" for a few reasons.
Estimates of the proportion of right-handed people in the population varies widely from 70% to 90%, but whatever it is, the actual number is far from 99.99%, in contrast to the proportion of non-trans people. So it would be incorrect to say right-handed is "normal-handed" (unless one is joking, of course). It may be the majority, but not the norm.
The accommodations for people of a certain handedness are very understandable and very reasonable. E.g. talking about manufacturing left-handed or right-handed computer mice. So there's plenty of innocuous reasons to use the term.
Most of the time that "right-handed" or similar is used, it is used neutrally and without a negative connotation. E.g. this isn't about the actual hands of people, but talking about how to drive on the right-hand side of the road with a vehicle that has a steering wheel on the right-hand side of the car. (I say most of the time, though, because I just searched "right-handed" on Twitter to look at the usage of the term, and there are a few recent tweets mock-arguing that it is a slur in response to Elon Musk's tweet, which I can decidedly say means it is being used in a negative context.)
If you mean language policing as in "don't say the n-word", then I guess so. But I agree with that policing insofar as I don't really think it's productive to let people say the n-word all the time, although at that point it's more about behavior, not language.
If you mean language policing as in "say 'people of color' instead of 'black people'", I don't think that's the same thing, because "black people" is definitely a neutral term (and as a minor point, "people of color" is just more awkward to say).
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They are slurs when people use them with the intention of a put-down, not because they inherently denigrate "normal people", whatever that means.
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If I kept going on about the straights, able-bodied, and neurotypicals who are doing things that I deem to be unpleasant, at some point I expect others to treat me like I'm using slurs. That's kind of how slurs evolved in the first place, otherwise they wouldn't be slurs. Most of the time, I don't have any reason to use those particular terms anyway, so if I want to talk about those kinds of people, I just don't use "straight", "able-bodied", or "neurotypical". I generalize this from the principle of talking about everyone like they want to be included in the conversation.
And, yes, "cis" doesn't sound neutral to me. Adding a qualifier in front of something inherently implies that it's different from the norm. If I kept talking about "blorg men" and "blorg women" and "blorg people", I sincerely doubt that any person would think that I'm talking about the vast majority of people. Rather, they would think that I would be talking about some minority of people with the "blorg" attribute, whatever "blorg" may mean. I would expect them to be confused if I told them I'm simply talking about people who, say, have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Double their confusion if, preceding this, I was ranting about "blorg privilege" and how "blorg people have it easy" and similar statements.
Well, for one, I don't really see criminals demand to not be called a "criminal" that often, if at all. For two, this would be kind of pointless, because the accusation of someone's criminality goes far beyond just surface-level labeling. Like, personally, you can tell me someone is a criminal, but I'd ask you for specifics. And then if you told me "well, he was convicted of the sexual assault of a woman", there's not really many language games one can do to weasel out of that accusation besides challenging the definition of "sexual assault" (and of course, "woman").
For three, I don't go on angry rants about people I describe as "criminal". Like, I can think of plenty of cases where "criminal" would be unacceptable, but those are when it's obvious the speaker is using it as a thinly-veiled replacement for "black" (e.g. "I hate people with criminal skin color"). The same cannot be said for "cis", and while anecdotal, at least one person (WhiningCoil) has replied to my comment corroborating this. I also don't treat all people described as "criminal" like they're a unified group who are all in coordination to achieve some common goal.
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Honestly, in certain contexts I would consider those slurs. Able-bodied aside (and that probably because I don’t know that many disabled progressives), I’ve certainly heard straight and neurotypical used in the same way slurs are.
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Why is neutral-valence terminology appropriate in a given context?
I'm no authority, but I think at least a part of the progressive project is to encourage language that's less exclusionary. The idea here is that by having neutral-valence terms to describe each other without resorting to the kind of implicit judgment a term like "normal" contains. There's an implied acceptance or tolerance when labeling something normal that I think most humans probably have some psychological need for. Certainly, it's at least preferable to being sorted into a category that's implicitly abnormal, and thus much more likely to be subject to ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice.
"Racist", "Sexist", "Homophobe", etc, are all exclusionary by any reasonable definition. If Progressives just want neutral-valience language to describe each other without resorting to implicit judgement, why is their language packed to the gills with terms that implicitly judge others?
Again, I'm not an authority on progressive thought, but my best guess is that their argument would be that it's unfair to judge others on what they consider inalienable characteristics like gender identity, race, sex, etc. but that beliefs and behaviors are relatively more choosable and thus fair game.
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Why don't you go ahead and claim jailing people for kidnapping is hypocritical?
The point is that Progressives are not interested in a neutral viewpoint in the abstract, but only as a tool to undermine moral views they disagree with. They do not treat their own moral views with similar skepticism or "objectivity". Hence, the appeal to neutral viewpoint is not itself neutral. It is an isolated demand for rigor, and should be discussed with that reality in mind.
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The rules require that you respond to what was actually said before arguing something else. In particular, this means that putting words into people's mouths is not really allowed, even when you frame that move as a question. This is low effort, don't do this.
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Those terms are meta-exclusionary. They only exclude people who try to exclude others. This is reminiscent of Popper's intolerance of intolerance.
I expect you can come up with new examples that are not meta in this way, but of course, offhand, I cannot.
I'm largely repeating the response below, but I believe the actual causality is reversed: the people who use these terms take people they want to exclude and then deem those people as excluding others. Similar to the whole thing about Popper, which is that, by and large, the people who most loudly proclaim the principle are ones who take people they already don't want to tolerate and deem those people as being intolerant, in an effort to justify their pre-existing intolerance.
Should we then be intolerant of the intolerance of the intolerant...?
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No they don't. Someone can be a "racist" for having the wrong skin tone and singing along to the wrong song, or refusing to give up a rented CityBike. Moreover, as is increasingly popular on the left, there's a categorical denial that anyone who isn't white can be "racist" at all - thus "racist" itself is a term being used to exclude others.
Similarly with "sexist" and "homophobe." The most common use-case is attacking someone who holds disfavored object-level beliefs regarding, e.g., sexual morality or family formation.
You might be right in practice. I suppose this is the bailey, Esparanza's use is the motte.
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Actually, the outrage was worse than this. The argument of Twitter activists wasn't that she was refusing to give up her CitiBike. It's that she was trying to somehow steal the bike that the other black men had rented and was using her status/privilege(?) as a white woman to cry crocodile tears, and thus trying to get someone to call the police, and therefore the police arriving would commit racist police brutality on them, and therefore her resisting in that manner means that she was committing literal violence on them, despite there being more black men than her who were all individually physically stronger than her. And of course, therefore, it's appropriate that she be canceled and fired from her job as a nurse.
At least, that was the argument as I understood it. It's all completely incorrect, of course, and I do not endorse it in the slightest.
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"White"? "Bourgeoise"?
"Pedophile" is exclusionary and judgmental. Generally speaking, would you argue that Progressives are okay with judging and excluding pedophiles, or would you argue that they object to doing so?
If I say that homosexual acts are a sin, how is that more exclusionary and judgmental than a gay person saying that my moral assessment of homosexuality is bigoted and homophobic?
Also, you (or the progressives you're referring to) are misusing the paradox of tolerance. It applies to people who respond to argument with personal violence.
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The main difference compared with those other examples is that not everyone agrees the relevant axis (gender identity) exists or is coherently defined. By using the term "cis" you're implicitly buying into the premise that gender identity is a real, coherent thing.
That's different from being a slur though. I don't think astrology is real but if someone were to call me a virgo I wouldn't say they're using a slur.
That's fair, I don't actually think "cis" is a slur, but I do think it bothers some people for reasons that don't apply to terms like "straight."
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That’s such a Virgo thing to say. I bet you’re also a blood type O.
(This was an example of how nonconsensus and/or technical terminology can be used to insult someone.)
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More of a snarl than a slur, to my mind, but yes, I broadly agree with the idea that it's supposed to introduce an expectation of complexity where none need exist.
It's like you were reading a review of some piece of media, punctuated by a score; the implications in your mind are different between seeing "9/10" and "9.00/10.00". There's an implied complexity and nuance in the latter thanks to the introduced significant figures; because the expectation is that they are, in fact, significant in some way. Even if you never really rate anything any score but whole numbers.
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I'm OK with "cis" when the topic of discussion is already transsexualism/transgenderism/etc. But in ordinary language, yeah, a cis-man is just a man. And yes, this view is pretty similar to "trans-men are women" (or rather, "trans-men are not men").
What I find weird about the verbiage is that trans/cis is supposed to be about a boundary, i.e.: transalpine Gaul is from the other side of the Alps whilst cisalpine Gaul is from our side, from the specific point of view of Italians.
But through the mutations of language we've gone from the original term of cis/transsexual (well the translation from the German) to cis/transgender to cis/trans to cis/trans-man/woman.
So now not only is it a freestanding signifier, no longer about anything that can be conceptualized as a boundary, it's also lost any subjective content as to the position we're evaluating from.
Ironically the people who even use the word "cis" likely mean it to apply to people who are on the other side of whatever boundary we're actually talking about, which makes it all the more linguistically absurd.
I thought the metaphor was that a cis person is a person whose sex and gender both reside on the same side of the gender/sex binary, whereas a trans person is someone whose sex and gender reside on different sides of said boundary.
I'm fairly sure "trans" came first, from "transsexual", meaning someone who desires to cross the boundary between man and woman. Wikipedia suggests this (highly politically incorrect) article as the source in English, and refers to an earlier German source. Then "cis" is just the opposite of "trans".
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I mean that's a good explanation for the original meaning but that doesn't really work with anything that uses gender, the concept, or any reasoning for transwomen being women.
We are so past the simple gender is social, sex is biological line of argument at this point that I doubt you could rescue some coherent definitions.
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The gender-critical would say that a trans woman is a trans-identified man, or TiM for short.
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I do find it curious that more and more, forms that choose you to identify yourself provide many genders to choose from, but when it comes to who you want to date, the only choices are "men" or "women". No "ciswoman" option to select.
I think titles have much less pressure to need to identify anything concrete than labels people need to find a reproduction partner.
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I believe Hinge may be an exception to this rule, which both allows the user to select from an obscenely long list of genders to describe oneself and an obscenely long list of genders that one is interested in dating. But it's many months since I used it so I could be wrong.
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It seems to me he's just doing it to show the people clamoring for censorship that it goes both ways, and they don't really want it as much as they want opinions and voices they don't like muzzled.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
No, I think that's a lot of it, there's definitely an undercurrent of "sure does suck when a hostile actor controlling the platform defines your speech as hateful arbitrarily and then bans it, doesn't it?"
But I don't expect that point will be taken, even if he were to all but spell it out.
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Good. No one has ever applied the cis label to me in a non-hateful manner. It's always been to indicate I'm their moral, intellectual, experiential and political inferior. That, bafflingly, my status as a cis man disqualifies me from having any sort of legitimate perspective on the male human condition. Or really any aspect of the human condition, period. Because alphabet people are the new humanity now. Nothing else qualifies.
You left out "normal"
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