Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
But ask a random person what's in it for someone who wants to be a woman and he'd likely be at a loss.
I mean, let me just ask: do you really think that there's so little to recommend in the lives of half of all humanity, approximately 4 billion people, that no rational actor, under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, could ever want to be one of them?
If you do believe that to be the case, then the logical corollary is that you should become the most ardent of committed feminist activists. Alleviating their suffering would surely be the most pressing of political issues.
(I'm intentionally being a bit glib, but, what you said could be interpreted in that way.)
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Although, as a libertarian, perhaps you are okay with both surgeries
Yes.
I'm actually mostly ok with saying that transsexuality is a mental illness. On the one hand, from a certain perspective that's literally what it is: it's an abnormal neurological development that causes adverse health effects, most notably to the reproductive system. On the other hand, I want to stress that it's not merely a mental illness. An individual's reasons for wanting to transition, or wanting to be the opposite gender, can be very complex and multifaceted, and they can go beyond a simple "my body just doesn't feel right". The "wrong body map" theory is a convenient and digestible PR narrative that the trans community can use to explain the phenomenon to normies and make it more medically legitimate, but it only covers a small portion of people's actual experiences.
I do think that the neuroscience underlying transsexuality differs in crucial ways from the neuroscience underlying other types of body dysmorphia, but I don't know the current state of research in this area and I have no way of directly proving it, and at any rate it's a largely academic question.
Regarding the references to amputation, I feel compelled to note, contra Freud, that a vagina is not the mere absence of a penis; it is its own organ, it's just as much of a positive presence as a penis is. The ideal for MTFs is not to engage in a simple act of self-destruction, but to trade one functioning sexual organ for another (current surgical techniques, of course, cannot actually achieve this, but can only provide a facsimile of it).
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Bro I'm gonna be deadass honest with you, there are a lot of freaks who are just gonna hang out in the bathroom and listen to women fart and piss if we don't have separate bathrooms. But if women are cool with that then sure, tear down those walls.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
To be clear, I personally believe that the criteria for membership in a gender category is relatively straightforward, and I believe that most other people believe this too, even if they claim not to. A man is an adult human male with XY chromosomes that produces sperm. A woman is an adult human female with XX chromosomes that produces eggs. A few edge cases don’t impugn the general validity of the definition. Everyone knows this, including trans activists, probably.
I don’t believe that SRS as it currently exists is capable of changing someone from one gender to the other. But, given that these matters are so deeply intertwined with matters of personal identity, I can understand why some people would opt for the “next best thing”, even if it’s not perfect.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
You’re conflating two things that I never conflated. There are two separate questions:
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Whether the desire for SRS (or being trans in general) is coherent and understandable, outside of being a product of “mental illness or brainwashing”.
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Whether society should rearrange itself to accommodate the desires of trans people.
I was only addressing (1). Personally, I answer yes to (1) and no to (2).
I don’t believe that, at our current level of medical technology, men can become women. If you’re born a man then you’ll stay a man. And as a corollary, I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men) should be given access to women’s spaces, nor should they expect to be recognized as women by other people. But, in line with my general libertarian priors, I think that consenting adults should mostly be free to dress how they want and get whatever medical procedures they want, and I understand why some people would opt for SRS for psychological comfort, even though it can’t actually at the end of the day fully realize their desires.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
The language.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
I’m not a furry at all and have basically never interacted with that community, so you’d have to ask them.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
It's unreasonable to think watching Madoka Magica can induce this in otherwise genetically healthy individuals.
Holy shit lmao. I’m stealing that one.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation.
I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.
If someone could wish for all these things, then why couldn’t they wish to be the opposite gender as well? Is it so much of a stretch?
And if you can accept the comprehensibility of that sort of wish, then I don’t think the comprehensibility of SRS is too much of a stretch, although I absolutely understand why many people would evaluate that the drawbacks are not worth the benefits, and that it might be considered odd or disconcerting for that reason.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation
Sure. But
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Themes of transformation and metamorphosis are incredibly common throughout fiction (not to mention throughout biological reality), in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. So it’s not particularly surprising that three randomly selected stories touch on those themes.
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Undoubtedly, fantasies of transformation are very common among both boys and girls. And those fantasies might be inspired by fiction media. But isn’t the average little boy more likely to fantasize about transforming into something, y’know, male? A stronger man? Or maybe at least just self-inserting as the male hero in the show? What could explain the fact that a very small minority of boys go off in a completely random and unexpected direction and fantasize about transforming into women instead? Nothing in the show itself (given the examples we’re talking about). Which is why I hypothesize that some of them simply have a latent disposition to think this way, due to biological factors.
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re getting at with this whole section. Pick any randomly selected battle shounen written for a young male audience (especially one made before 2010) and the female characters will clearly be less important and less capable than the male characters who actually drive the plot forward.
To the extent that you’re picking up on a real pattern, it’s just art imitating life. Yes, an attractive woman is socially desirable and she can convince others to actively work towards soothing her anxieties, by virtue of the fact that she is an attractive woman. That’s not anime propaganda, that’s just reality.
one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life.
You mean… the exact same sorts of sexual fantasies that cis women have?
I don’t know how familiar you are with erotic fiction written by-cis-women-for-cis-women, but the exact same themes of subservience, of being “owned”, of courting favor and protection from those stronger than you, are extraordinarily common. This is just how feminine sexuality works. Usually not presented in such an overtly fetishistic way, of course. Although they sometimes are. I’ve certainly come across puppygirl stories for cis women too.
Some people naturally gravitate towards a supporting role. Many of those people are either women, or would prefer to be women. All of this is wholly unsurprising to me.
To be honest, I think your incredulity at the idea that some people could be born gay or trans (or at least be born with underlying factors that predispose them to that sort of developmental pathway) is just the rightist version of the leftist incredulity at the idea that some people are born stupid and violent. People love biology when it supports their ideology, and then they reach for “social construction” when it doesn’t. I simply consistently remain on the side of biology in all cases.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Well I thought we were in agreement that autistic men were overrepresented among MTFs at least, and therefore it would be pertinent to analyze things from that angle.
There are of course non-autistic transitioners too.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
The Republican midterm strategy has been to repeatedly yell transgender and immigration over and over and over again at voters like the 9/11 family guy skit, hoping to get people to look past the financial disaster/corruption/etc.
If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up? Why not just capitulate and become anti-trans and anti-immigration so there will be nothing more to talk about, and we can get onto important issues like economics and corruption?
The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
I'm inclined to think that there's some further underlying factor that explains the trans + anime connection, rather than a specifically anime -> trans pipeline (and maybe that underlying factor is just "autism").
I unfortunately can't serve as a perfectly controlled experiment, because I was exposed to anime from an extremely young age. But I was having persistent thoughts about wanting to be a woman by the time I was around 10 years old, and prior to that time, I had only been exposed to what I would consider to be very "normal" mainstream children's anime with pretty normal male role models, like Pokemon and Yugioh and DBZ (Cardcaptor Sakura got shuffled in there too, but, I would be shocked if one show with a female protagonist had such a profound lifelong impact on my psychology).
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
I think @MaiqTheTrue is quite correct about this. There are so many male archetypes to choose from both throughout history and throughout fiction media. Almost any type of path you can imagine has already been charted. Even if you're a loser failure incel, that's still a known archetype; you still have an identity, you still have a community of people like you and a place in that community. And who knows, maybe you'll turn it around and eventually become successful and make something of yourself. That too is a known quantity, a story that has been written many times: the tortured soul, the misunderstood genius who is only appreciated by posterity, etc.
Regardless of what you think about the female archetypes and role models on offer, it's pretty undeniable that there are simply fewer of them. You can be a wife and mother, and frankly I think many (most?) women would still be quite happy enough with that, although the cultural (not to mention economic) status of motherhood is more tenuous than it has ever been. You can also be a woke feminist political agitator, although that will understandably be unappealing to women who are not already fully committed to that ideology.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
It could go either way.
Transformation fetishes are probably more common in the general population than you would expect.
I thought R. L. Stine's Goosebumps books were fire when I was a little kid (like pre-pubescent). I didn't even know at the time that the animal and monster transformation scenes were giving me (proto-)sexual feelings. I just knew that I was very fascinated by them, for reasons I couldn't articulate.
Primaprimaprima
1d ago
Yeah, I was thinking about the link between autism and transsexuality recently. (I almost prefer to use terms like "spergy" or "spergy personality traits" over "autistic", because I'm somewhat skeptical about the existence of autism as a legitimate diagnostic entity, and at any rate most of the people who call themselves "autistic" don't seem to me to have any serious diagnosable disorder; they just have personality traits that are outside of the norm, that's all. But I'll continue to use "autistic" to mean "people who generally have spergy personality traits, at any degree of severity".)
One thing I noticed from my admittedly limited sample of talking to autistic women is that their speech patterns and thought processes are very close to those of autistic men in many ways; they experience many of the same struggles as well (personal, social, etc). The gap between autistic men and autistic women is noticeably smaller than the gap between normal men and normal women. This got me to thinking that, if an intrinsic part of autism is a decreased desire/ability to express highly differentiated sexual behavior that would be typical of one's birth sex, then both autistic men and autistic women might be more likely to experience a less defined and more fluid sense of gender identity (almost like they got thrown into a "third gender" bucket together) and thus might be more likely to be drawn to transsexualism.
I don't think this is a complete explanation or anything; at the very least there's still something uniquely malebrained about the whole phenomenon of MTFism; but I still felt that it was worth noting.
Anime is actively anti-trans
This was maybe the case through the 00s, but there are modern examples now like Onii-chan Wa Oshimai that are decidedly pro-trans, or at least trans-neutral. Onimai is definitely not a kids' show though, and it's not the sort of thing that children would randomly stumble onto by chance, unlike how say, a child in the 90s/00s might randomly have been exposed to other "effeminate" anime like Ranma or Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura (granted, everyone is given open access to the internet and Discord from birth now, so, you never know).
Kodaka's works are a bit different for a reason I really don't want to get into
The funny thing about Kodaka's games is that they're just a bit... zesty, in general (and this has only ramped up over time with Hundred Line and Shuten Order), and thus have attracted a very large tumblr/fujo type of fanbase in the west, despite being ostensibly targeted at a mostly male audience.
Topically for transgenderism, though, there's a particular 'you only think it's desexualized because what the sexualization actually is won't be coherent to you'
Yeah I'm really fascinated by this. This is a common phenomenon whenever genderbender media breaks containment and gets some mainstream exposure. There were many confused comments online about Onimai, ranging from "why isn't he more pissed off at his sister for doing nonconsensual medical experiments on him and turning him into a girl? That's assault" (lol) to "it's a serious story about the struggles that young women face in adolescence" (infinite omega lol). The answer to all that of course is that you're not supposed to think that hard about it because it's essentially porn; it's just, porn that's transmitting on a frequency that you're not tuned into.
Tanya I can confirm is totally desexualized though. The genderswap is just a plot device to get the story going and then it's essentially never brought up again. There are quite a few isekai and other stories like that now.
I'm pretty sure mentions of this are just crypto-feminist (more typically labelled "social conservative") psyops trying to discredit perfectly normal things
I mostly agree with you. I think a lot of people are just genuinely, sincerely flabbergasted by the idea that anyone could ever desire to be the opposite sex, unless they were coerced into thinking that way by external circumstances, and "it's all discord grooming" is their attempt to proffer some sort of explanation that they can make sense of. I don't think grooming plays nearly as big a role as some other people here do.
That being said. I was deadass talking to someone just the other day who told me "this guy in a Rust discord convinced me to start taking estrogen". I'm 99% sure they weren't memeing. They were a couple years into their transition. So my reaction was 1) of course it was Rust lol, and 2) sometimes the conspiracy theories and most damning accusations about your political opponents simply turn out to be true.
The corresponding responsibility to your right of veto over your child's sexuality is to actively search for situations where they can get laid.
This part I don’t really agree with though. I’m a consistent anti-egalitarian to the end. Broadly speaking, if a male can’t get laid on his own, then he shouldn’t be having sex; social engineering efforts to the contrary would be dysgenic. (Although I still support monogamous marriage as a preferable social order over polygamy, and I don’t feel particularly inconsistent in doing so.)
Primaprimaprima
2d ago
Generally speaking, yes, although there are cases of FTMs who have essentially the same psychology and motivations as MTFs (just, you know, with the genders reversed).
Primaprimaprima
2d ago
Is it that they don't like seeing attractive women in media, or they don't like the idea of MEN seeing attractive women in media?
I think both factor into it.
I suppose it could just be as simple as "I don't want (unworthy autistic) men to be able to view images of attractive women". That would be needlessly vindictive and petty of them though, so out of charity I'm trying to find alternative explanations.
Primaprimaprima
2d ago
I mean, Final Fantasy X-2 was rated Teen too.
Primaprimaprima
2d ago
Hypothesis 1: they sincerely prefer this style and cannot understand why anyone would not like it. Maybe it's a learned preference.
I wouldn't call it "learned".
There's a certain brand of woke woman that just genuinely does not enjoy seeing attractive women in media, and they would prefer for them to be unattractive where possible. I believe that this is a genuine, pre-political, pre-reflective reaction on their part (you should generally assume that other people's emotional reactions are genuine as a matter of charity). The question is why they feel this way.
If you ask them, they'll usually say something like "because those sexed up female character designs are objectifying, and I want men to stop objectifying women". But this answer is unsatisfactory for multiple reasons, both because it seems to be based on a mistaken assumption (that there is a mythical type of "authentic" relationship between people that is based on the Intrinsic Properties Of Their Souls rather than what they offer to each other in quantifiable terms), and because the revealed preference of many women (including many wokes!) indicates that they enjoy being "objectified" to a certain extent.
I imagine that the phenomenon is explained at least partially by the general leftist hatred of inequality and competition; it's just being applied to intra-female sexual competition in this case, rather than the more traditional domain of economics. If there are no attractive women, then all women can be equal in their ugliness. If all big budget games/shows/movies were contractually obligated to include at least one billionaire character who was virtuous and heroic and admirable (in the same way that audiences generally expect female characters to be conventionally attractive), and there were any leftists left who still made class analysis their primary focus, then we could imagine such leftists getting similarly frustrated and demanding that media start including more heroic poor people to balance things out.
Primaprimaprima
2d ago
Rose is literally an attractive young woman with a sort of hot-blooded anime protagonist look
Nah she looks like a dude.
Getting “outraged” over it is silly of course, but the design definitely reads as more “woke” than “conventionally attractive anime design”.
Primaprimaprima
4d ago
And people wonder why so many young men want to cut their dicks off.
At least then they might be seen as human.
Primaprimaprima
5d ago
First off, it was a movement which explicitly selected for people who struggled with naturally, what's the phrase, "overcoming bias" (non-rationalists who do this naturally do it in very fuzzy ways, the classic intelligence/wisdom thing).
Maybe I’ve just been swayed by the Rationalists’ PR campaign, but I’d wager that the average Rationalist is better at overcoming bias than the average human (which is not to say that they’re immune to it, far from it); or at the very least, people who are naturally better at overcoming bias are more likely to be drawn to Rationalism as a hobby or social group.
The average human is very bad at overcoming bias, and the Rationalists are perhaps not much better, but I’d still be inclined to put them on the upper end of the bell curve. The average person just does not think about this stuff at all, so they’re usually just going to unreflectively reify whatever biases they walk in with.
Well now I'm kinda curious. Do you think being a woman is that much worse than being a man? (I don't want to draw you into a long obnoxious argument, I just want to make sure I'm properly understanding you.)
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