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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:
It really does strike me that Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aella et al are putting on the kid gloves tight when it comes to the proposals of transgenderism.
Take Scott, for example, responding to the 4chan post about trans-Napoleonism. He basically says "just let him wear the silly bicorne hat" and points to "Emperor" Norton of San Francisco as a happy-go-lucky story of just going along with what a trans-emperor says because it's easier. But he doesn't ever adequately address the hardball arguments - a Napoleon-gender that demands absolute power over the French Empire and its satellites in Europe (as the 4chan post said), and a Norton that demands the head of President Rutherford B. Hayes (as you, Zack M. Davis, point out). As far as I can tell, Scott's response to people pointing out the demands for a French Empire and Hayes's head - although he doesn't explicitly state this - is "lol, that just doesn't happen".
This is a very troubling dismissal, because there are a lot of Rutherfords in transgenderism. The reason why people point out President Rutherford Hayes and demands for a French Empire is because transgenderism affects others - it has externalities - and attempting to cure someone's distress by agreeing to their false map of reality is not a cost-free action and is not something with no meaningful consequences to other people (hence, the story about putting the hair dryer in the passenger seat is simply irrelevant). In other words, "just be nice" is a really bad argument.
For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. Everyone seems to agree that it would be a very bad thing if a trans-Napoleon today gained control over the countries that used to make up the former French Empire, or if Norton was given the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, so they just... dismiss those and say it could never happen. They say they would never demand Rutherford's head and that it's absurd to even consider the possibility that Rutherford might be decapitated to fulfill the desires of an Emperor Norton.
And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
In my opinion, the refusal to honestly engage with these arguments reflects poorly on the leaders - or otherwise influential figures - of the rationalist community. To put it lightly, it's unbelievable how they make a simple mistake - that their own foundational writings (the Sequences) warned about - and how they have failed to correct their own mistake (at least, they haven't corrected it yet, although I'm not optimistic about their chances of doing so).
I found three since 2017,
Here
Here
And another one I had formatted but hit the back button and inadvertently lost my mobile post.
Having posted this I have to admit I sadly don't trust the media to report on this topic in good faith.
This incident "happened in a private bathroom at a residence". Bathroom bills don't cover private homes and could not have prevented this.
Addressed here.
Certainly not the NYT or WaPo, but there are plenty of media organizations with an anti-trans editorial stance. They would surely publicize any such cases.
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