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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Hello Motte world! Some of you may remember me as /u/M_T_Saotome-Westlake on the Reddit incarnation. (I've since dropped the pseudonym which I was using for my political writing.)

I recently published the first two parts of my memoir telling the Whole Dumb Story of my conflict with the so-called "rationalist" community about (at first) the etiology of gender dysphoria in males and (later, much less excusably) the philosophy of language regarding categorization, which I would like to share with you today:

I’ve seen your blog in the wild before and always wanted to respond, so I’m happy to see you here!

I will second a few comments and encourage you to attempt to condense your writing; your two linked articles are long even by the standards of this community and engaging with them in their entirety would take a lot of effort. I think I can summarise, from skimming them and having read a bit of your blog, but do correct me if I make any mistakes:

  • You disagree with Scott et al’s assertion that categories are purely man-made and believe that there are natural ways to “carve reality at its seams”
  • This comes up with trans people where you state there’s natural binary categories of male/female or man/woman, and disagree with the pro-trans view
  • You further support the Blanchardian taxonomy of autogynophiliacs (AGP) vs homosexual transsexuals (HSTS) as opposed to the gender identity or “brain in a body of the opposite sex” mainstream view
  • You yourself have very intense autogynophilia and mild gender dysphoria which has caused you significant amounts of distress (hence the long posts)
  • You tried HRT but it didn’t do much for you, and stopped
  • You claim fulfilling the AGP fantasy is impossible for the foreseeable future as it requires you not only to have a body typical of the opposite sex but also a brain (as per Yudkowsky’s post that RandomRanger brought up).
  • You had a break with progressivism in 2017

With that in mind, I do wonder if perhaps one of your issues is that you saw a false dichotomy between two extreme viewpoints of “gender theory”: either men are men and women and women and accepting trans people is lying about biological reality (perhaps for the sake of a fetish), or that being trans is purely due to an innate sense of gender identity that’s not aligned with the body, and that we should 100% respect someone’s self-declared gender no matter their appearance.

But I don’t think I’ve seen you address the “trans medical”/truscum POV which would be relatively uncommon nowadays but which is to me the most sensible one. There’s a condition called gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress towards one’s biological sex. The most effective treatment is transitioning, and the goal is to pass as the opposite sex and have people refer to you by the right pronouns based on your appearance. Your sexual orientation, “gender identity”, etc. is basically irrelevant, the only thing that matters is, do you feel better on HRT and is your life improved by transitioning?

And I agree you that being trans gender is not a physical intersex condition in the sense of “brain stuck in an opposite sex body”, what do you think about hypotheses like Meyer-Powers syndrome or the RCCx hypothesis? You stated you were neurodivergent but I do wonder if you have any of the other physiological symptoms - almost all the trans people I know do. I ask this because there are anecdotal reports of possible treatment for mild gender dysphoria that can be an option if you are open to possibilities other than “I have a fetish” or “I am a woman on the inside”.

I’ve brought these links up before and very aware that any conclusion they have are purely conjecture, but checking physical symptoms and getting tested for a gene mutation is something that might give you objective results. I am also biased towards the trans medical POV because that’s what worked for me as a trans woman who didn’t fit in either the Blanchardian typology or the woke gender identity narrative.

I support people transitioning if it makes their life better, but I'm pretty skeptical of subtle intersex conditions whose main symptom is a mysterious desire to be the other sex. I'd expect actual brain-intersex stuff to mostly look like HSTS: markedly sex-atypical behavior that's visible to other people and causes social problems. To the extent that the two-type taxonomy is wrong, I expect social factors to be the main third cause.

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