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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841

Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.

The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.

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).

So why don't people want to be called "cis"?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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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