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Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:
Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:
...
Indeed.
So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.
The counter argument here is rather simple. Edge cases don't need to be the basis for how we construct our society.
Yeah, it's hard to even imagine a more fitting example for the case against 'respecting someones identity' than what you just gave. But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument? Are walking contradictions like Madden's more or less common than the teenager? Obviously the teenager is more common and drastically so.
It's not a bridge too far to say that we can respect people on the basis they wish to be respected. We do that all the time. Baked into your example is a whole bunch of protected identities. Jew. Woman. Gay. How far should we go to respect those? And what is the view people generally have towards those identities, and why? Well, the punishment for not respecting these identities is jail time. On the flipside there are special events to celebrate them and belonging to them can offer a variety of special privileges. I mean, women who torture and kill children get a comfy womens prison to go to. Men who can't pay child support get locked in a cell with an AIDS riddled rapist.
If you don't like trannies just say that. Because respecting someones identity goes all the way and no one disagrees with the notion that their ingroup should be respected and protected. If you want to engineer a social norm that says trannies are not kosher, then talk about that. But currently the powers that be are working overtime making trannies into a protected identity just like jews, women and gays are. One schizophrenic jew is not going to stop them. We've paved over far worse to get to where we are today.
The principle that it's never to the long-term benefit of the subject to affirm the "importance" of identity. In mental health terms, it's long-term destructive to humor a patient's delusion. In societal terms, it's long-term destructive to stress identitarianism. In individual terms, it's harmful to place so much importance on one unstable factor that puts them in natural conflict with other individuals/groups. And I'm an individualist!
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My argument would be is we can cure those teenagers, partially, by dealing with the Maddens, the Jenners, Levine s,etc and just publicly shaming and laughing at them instead of tolerating and elevating their egregious conduct.
That's sort of a different topic. You're not really respecting their identity by being transphobic about it and maintaining that it's something to be cured, regardless of anything else.
But on that point, marginalizing the already marginalized doesn't, in my view, solve anything. All it does is reinforce the victimary discourse those groups rely on. Sure, it might change the discourse if transphobia wasn't banned to the extent it is now, but how much? For reference, no matter how much fun comedians in the 80's and 90's made of feminists they all have to toe the line today. Society has genuinely changed towards feminist ideals.
Well of course, because I believe it is a false consciousness, taught to them by others who are crazy and/or evil and needs to be treated and cured with reality, not coddled until they turn themselves from depressed teens into sterilized depressed teens.
That is a true description of the feminist victories in the culture war, but we are all the worse for it, these poor confused teens most of all.
Marginalizing the trans advocates solves quite a bit in this frame, because it means that teens are not confused by the message that being trans makes you a special snowflake who will receive unearned accolades (as most trans public figures get). Yes often these kids are marginalized, typically they were before they became trans. The transness is their hope for relevancy. It is no coincidence that trans kids, statistically, almost always have a mother with a mental illness, often severe such as borderline personality. There is a genetic component, likely, to be predispositioned to a mental illness (trans being the newest faddish one) and also the fact that having a trans kid is a status icon for this subset of mothers.
I hope for a return to sanity and we need not have a new age of scientism akin to the lobotomy craze of the mid 20th century, alas I despair we will have another era of quack-psychiatry butchery.
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They are, on the other hand, excellent tests for how we think about things.
The most plainly I can state my position on the matter is that I don't think I should feel morally obligated (less still, be legally obligated) to respect people's stated identities. Instead, I think my obligation to respect someone's identity extends as far as that identity is reflected in the actual reality of the individual and what they seem to wish to gain from using that identity.
I don't have a generalizable problem with trans-identified individuals. I know trans-identified individuals that are personally pleasant, have made an honest attempt to appear to be their chosen gender, and that require nothing onerous from anyone. As the saying goes, they just want to be left alone. I'm more than happy to provide them with the respect and decency that they want (and in my opinion) deserve.
My point is not that no one should have their stated identity respected, it's that there are examples of people who clearly have fake, illegitimate identification, and that this demonstrates that not all stated identities need to be respected by either individuals or the state. Where that line is will be a matter of legal wrangling and personal inclinations, but I reject the frame that allows a literal Nazi human-butcherer to convert to a Jewish woman when convenient.
If I identified as a heterosexual male and spent my weekends in gay bars picking up guys who I would then have sex with, then for people to refuse to respect my identity as a heterosexual male would be absolutely appropriate whether I liked it or not.
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Explain to me how this affects me? Like all the dudes around me pretend I am gay and thus? The ladies all pretend I'm gay even though they know I am not, so they accept my dates and then make out with me at the bar anyways until the best one "pretends" her way through our wedding and kids and we die together as a totally gay man has totally tricked himself into living like every happy straight man ever. Except he lived life on easymode because he could hang out with any woman at all times (even those with boyfriends which he then could steal away if he so wanted because the delusion only can be maintained up until the boner is in your vagina). What is this burden?
Gay men can't marry straight women?
I was alive in 1999. A person who acted entirely like a straight man, but there was a weird conspiracy theory that predominated that he is secretly gay wouldn't be that badly off.
But this isn't a consistent analogy at all. Trans women who are treated like men aren't worse off than normal men, except when they lash out and act crazy in the face of equal treatment.
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I agree it's a good test, but if we are not extrapolating our thinking to the relevant larger things in this context, then what we can discuss becomes limited. I like the people I like and I dislike the people I dislike. There's not much there.
If someone I like has an identity, 'fake' or 'real', in whatever sense, I'm not all that fussed about it. If I like them and it's real to them then it's real to me no problem. Because I like them. If it's fake to the outgroup I don't care. So long as they are not harming the ingroup I'd want anyone I like to have everything they need. Especially if the perception is that what they need is coming from the outgroup in some way. (I mean, tl;dr: I tolerate my ingroup, not the outgroup.)
You made Madden an example because they are so very easily outgroupable. No one wants to own the criminally insane outside of extreme circumstance. But if Madden can be used to harm the prospects of the ingroup in some way then that will get called out. Which is the immediate perceptions trannies have whenever this kind of thing gets brought up. And I'd argue their perceptions are entirely correct.
If this topic is only about our personal likes, then we all dislike Madden and there is nothing more to be said. If this is not about our personal taste then it's about respecting people and their identities and how far one could or should go. The only reason this is a topic in modern discourse is because of trannies. This subject, if anything is to be discussed, can only be understood through the lens of trans-rights. And to that end the matter has already been settled.
Trannies will get ingrouped, they will be placed in womens prisons or an extremely expensive alternative. Some women will be raped as a consequence and that's fine. We already accept mass rape as an acceptable price for others to pay for our modern moral sensibilities. The potential fallout and harm that might be caused by a few women being raped in jail is chicken shit compared to what's already been done and celebrated in the name of ending segregation.
This is true and you don’t even have to go to desegregation for examples- the US largely accepts that lots of people will get raped in male prisons, after all. Extending it to female prisons is just equality of the sexes.
You're right.
My usual spiel relates to rapes, violent assault and murder, all of which are dramatically exasperated by race tensions and desegregation. But I forgot to mention the two latter ones.
On that front the issue of violence in prisons in general is separate to the additional violence added on top of that due to nothing other than desegregation. The amount of violence added due to that policy dwarfs anything trannies could do in a womens prison. So the meat of the argument is the comparison between those two policies.
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Umm, has this Nazi cannibal gay porn star taken any steps towards becoming Jewish? Unlike transgenderism, Jewishness has actual identity standards.
For religious purposes, would a penectomy be considered functionally equivalent to a circumcision (albeit a horrifically botched one)?
/s
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I don't know, the articles I looked at didn't really get into that. The JP one about kosher meals that I linked suggests that the bar is incredibly low though.
The claim that it's easier to determine if someone is Jewish than whether someone is a woman is something I could not have predicted taking seriously just a few years ago.
I mean, it seems like this person’s actual identity is ‘criminally insane’, so I’m comfortable saying they’re neither. Obviously the prison system has other ideas.
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I understand your position, and can sympathize with it as I have seen several examples of people claiming identities in bad faith. It runs into trouble, though, when you have to have a mini-trial to determine who's entitled to what.
Well, you only need a "trial" when the outcome is important, like which prison to send an inmate to. And we already have a trial system for that; seems like the judge is in the best position to determine which prison would be appropriate, alongside all the other aspects of sentencing.
But in normal life, if we just acknowledge that it's not Literal Genocide to occasionally use the wrong pronouns, no trial is needed. Sure, if you're one of the rare edge cases where people genuinely mistake what gender you prefer, then you might have to keep announcing it and correcting people. It sucks a little, but not a lot.
I don't think that's enough. It allows for mistakes, but not differences of opinion--it still allows someone to demand use of a pronoun.
Actually I think invoking mistakes here is a smokescreen. None of the trans issues that people are conerned about involve mistakes.
Well, they can demand it, but it's society's support that allows that demand to have teeth. Like @Walterodim says, we need to get back to the point where you had no moral/legal obligation to comply when somebody else tries to control you.
You're right about the rest of the trans issues. I realize I was being a bit naive - bathroom/changing room access, for instance, is both important and far too common to litigate. Ending cancel culture isn't going to help us find a compromise between the two sides of that debate...
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