07mk
4hr ago
Passing is on the one hand used by TRAs to mean "polite people treat me as a woman when I obviously visibly signal that I wish to be treated as such." Which almost everyone can achieve.
If that's how TRAs use "passing," I've never encountered it, and it also seems like a vapid meaning, because the "polite" in your quote tends to refer to the characteristic of submitting to such wishes.
The way I understand it, the "test" that's being "passed" in this context is essentially the trans Turing Test (Turansing Test? Turans Test? Trunsing Test?). Now, obviously there are many tiny nuances and details of what qualifies as passing the Turing Test, but broadly, I think the idea is that, after interacting with a trans person, you can't tell that they're trans, then they "pass."
There are likely multiple ways to measure something like this. One theoretical study I imagine, blinded test subjects would interact with a group of people, some trans, some not, and then answered what sex each person they interacted with was born as. If a trans person had >50% of people answer as the opposite of their birth sex, that person would "pass." Another option would be to have test subjects interact with pairs of people, one trans and the other cis, of opposite sexes and the same gender, and if the subjects can correctly guess the trans person at >50% rate, then that person doesn't pass. Could also adjust it to be 1 trans and 9 cis, and if the rate is >10%, or any variation of this, I suppose.
The context also certainly matters a lot, but that can be both controlled for and also studied, to see how people's ability to "pass" change in different environments. What I'd personally love to see is correlations on the type and length of interaction. If you're just talking to someone, does their chance of "passing" go down or up as time goes, and is there some inflection point at which the "passing" rate suddenly skyrocket or plummet? What about if you add hugging to the mix? What if you're in a group setting, where all the other test subjects are confederates who have been instructed to treat the trans person like they do/don't "pass?" What if activities involving physical strength or severe emotional topics are involved?
It'd be fascinating to see some break down just what specific characteristics and interactions maximize and minimize the odds of "passing." It could give birth to a sort of "trans-o-sphere" equivalent of the "man-o-sphere" where trans people optimize on the traits that allow them to "pass" most effectively and efficiently, following a sort of "passMaxxing" strategy, if you will.
07mk
5hr ago
I feel like the entire rest of society, particularly the woke end has decided that the rape of women is a small price to pay for feeling progressive about letting transgender women into women’s spaces — without vetting at all.
I think what's more accurate is that they've convinced themselves that it simply "doesn't happen", or that "no one transitions just so they can use women's bathrooms".
This doesn't seem more accurate, but rather the "how," to the quoted part's "what." Deciding that such a cost is worth the benefit can be very unpleasant, depending on what the costs and what the benefits are. So unpleasant, that many people might be unwilling to make such a decision if they perceive it that way. So they decide to perceive it a different way, by convincing themselves that the cost isn't actually real, which allows them to make that decision. I see this pattern repeated all the time both in culture war contexts and not.
07mk
5hr ago
I would kill to see some high quality studies using blinded (I'm not sure double blinding is possible, since presumably a trans person would know they're trans) trials of test subjects interacting with both trans and cis people to see just how common it is to truly "pass." Sadly, the academic political environment makes it so that basically no one who would be positioned to do the research would be interested in having an answer. And even if that were not the case, the number of trans people is so small that getting sufficiently random or representative members of that group seem likely to be impossible.
The way I think of it is that, given how incentivized the current "progressive" trans movement is to present MTF as being exactly the same as females in every way that matters, if there were some fairly significant population of MTF trans people who "pass," there would be quite a few such people who are either held up as examples or who become mini-celebs as activists for the cause. There's certainly no shortage of MTF trans people who obviously don't "pass" that you can find both online and in-person (at least in my neck of the woods around Boston) despite the fact that, again, the number of such people is very small relative to the population. The only person like that who comes to my mind is Blaire White, whom I don't follow, but who I believe isn't on the side of the "progressives" in this.
07mk
7hr ago
Heck, I'm middle aged but not quite at that age yet, and I'm pretty much 99% of the way there. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that there's just no good reason to care about how other people perceive my body outside of a certain small subset of cases. Certainly not when they're strangers who are males in a locker room or other communal changing space. If other people dislike the sight of certain parts of my body, first of all, I empathize, but second, that's their problem, not mine. If the sight of my junk displeases them, I'm not going to lift a finger to help them solve their displeasure; I've got enough of my own to take care of, thank you.
This whole problem with being or viewing same-sex nudity in these kinds of contexts seemed pretty strange and somewhat arbitrary to me when I immigrated from Korea to America at the age of 6, and it took me some effort to adapt to it. In Korea, already by the age of 6, I was accustomed to going to public bath houses where men and boys (and, I presume women and girls as well, in their own half) of all ages would just freely walk around with everything out and minimal effort to cover anything up.
07mk
9hr ago
Likewise if a woman is walking home alone at night and notices a lone male person walking some distance behind her, and begins to form a suspicion that said person may be following her. I doubt very much that she would be consoled if said male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm not a rapist!"
David Cross came up with a jingle to properly communicate this notion over a decade ago.
07mk
1d ago
Now, one can't go back in time and say these things on November 3, 2024 when they would have been more costly in terms of status among the left, before it became common knowledge that these "progressive" positions were less popular or more hated than was believed by many/most mainstream leftists. So to demonstrate lack of cowardice today would require doing something similar: plant one's flag at a position that, even after the recent election created this common knowledge, would be considered low status and/or attract abuse from leftists. E.g. one option would be, don't just say that these "progressive" positions went too far, but say that the very structure that created these positions is rotten to the core, and that the electorate were correct in choosing the "fascist" over it, because the alternative is just that rotten. I suspect that such a statement would still face heavy censure from the Democratic mainstream and would thus be a demonstration that the person isn't just being cowardly and saying something only now that it's established that it's safe to do so.
07mk
3d ago
I recall reading it in a high school English class. I wouldn't say it became more memorable, but it was reinforced by 2 TV shows many years apart: 1st with Lost when an episode featured a vast stone foot that appeared to be the remains of a larger statue, which seemed like a clear reference to the poem; 2nd with Breaking Bad when an episode was titled Ozymandias in an explicit reference to the poem and likely meant to point out Walt's growing pride and hubris and hint at his inevitable downfall.
07mk
5d ago
I'd say you owe them nothing in debt. The person who lent you the charger presumably did so without you promising him some share of the proceeds from your use of the phone that's capable of being used due to the charger. The person presumably did so out of the goodness of his heart, because lending a charger is a very low cost act, so low that they were presumably willing to do so for no expectation of payment. Let's meet that expectation.
Otherwise, then we can raise the question of how much do you owe the cafe for using their energy (freely provided from their plugs) to power your phone to make this call that led to you earning billions of dollars? What about the phone company that connected you to this client, with the expectation that all they'd get out of it is your monthly subscription fee? What about the phone manufacturer who sold you the device that enabled you to talk to your client, with the expectation that all they'd get out of it is the upfront payment for the device?
I say, these people made their bed when they decided to provide their goods or services to you at whatever price they set; let them lie in it.
07mk
6d ago
I'd been noticing some high profile Twitter account deletions the past few days, but I hadn't thought of it as coordinated. Your note about what you heard on the BBC makes me think that there could be a coordinated push, and it all reminds me of the mainstream narrative about a week or two after Harris won the nomination, when we were deluged with talk about how everything suddenly felt different and hopeful, that there was a real sense of on-the-ground excitement about her candidacy, along with a sense of solidarity among all the Democrats falling in line now that their candidate was decided. It was a pretty transparent attempt at bootstrapping electoral momentum and excitement, and it fizzled out as expected within a few weeks, and the election, of course, proved beyond any doubt that it was completely made up.
There have been many pushes to get off of Twitter before, even before Musk's purchase of it, and this looks like just the latest. To be fair, I do think the Twitter boycotts have been more serious post-Musk, but following this election which proved that a majority of American voters preferred Trump over Harris, manufacturing some sort of popular notion that people are fed up with the disinformation and rightwing hate or whatever on Twitter, or that they just dislike Musk, isn't likely to gain much traction.
I do worry that this push will push a few more leftist figures to more echo chambers, but at the same time, this creates an opportunity for the less extreme leftist figures to use Twitter to engage and build something sane that can appeal to the mainstream crowd that uses Twitter.
In terms of AOC, this clip of hers asking Trump voters for who they follow came up on my Twitter feed the other day, so she could be actually trying to figure out why the Dems failed this election. Of course, many have called this just a Hundred Flowers Campaign, though I'd think, as a NY representative, she just couldn't do a whole lot to negatively affect these podcasts and internet celebs, so I'd actually take her at her word on this, which is surprising to me. I don't keep track of her, so I'm not sure how much of a woke true believer she is versus a leftist socialist making shrewd use of the advantages bestowed upon her by her genes within the woke environment that she inhabits, but I could believe she's the latter and ready to drop the trans ideology stuff if they seem to be disadvantageous to her political career (edit: I also stumbled on some rumors that she's pregnant, which certainly could transform her views very quickly - we'll find out within 9 months, I suppose).
Whether or not this represents Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability, I honestly think it might. When I've checked out clips from CNN, MSNBC, or NYTimes, Washington Post podcasts, i.e. media where I'd expect the mainstream Democratic view to be heavily overrepresented, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much actual self-reflection there is about how not distancing themselves from the woke side of the culture wars hurt Democrats and how little of the more expected "it's all the racist/misogynist white/black/Hispanic men's fault" narrative there is (still too much of the latter and too little of the former). In terms of high budget failures, 2024 has been the year of the woke, with a number of films, TV shows, video games, and a political party that fit the woke profile having essentially wasted literally billions of dollars. In any given failure, it's been easy to cope by pointing to non-woke reasons for the failure, but if you're greedy or power-hungry enough, that kind of pattern won't escape your notice.
I don't think this represents some major pivot by the party, though. They're coming to see it as a liability and making small corrections. What I'm hoping for is that in 2026, we'll see Democrats in contested local and Congressional elections finding success from specifically distancing themselves from the extremes of gender ideology and the like, allowing them to defeat other, more extreme Dems in the primaries, and the Republican opponents in the close 50/50 races. That'd be a sign that some actual progress is being made. However, if the next 2 years turns out to be disappointing for the electorate - which I think is the modal case for any presidential election - that'd leave the Republicans vulnerable to losing to extreme Democrats, which could embolden the extreme gender ideologues once again.
07mk
7d ago
So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.
I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.
I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.
07mk
9d ago
I've often dreaded the inevitable Back to the Future remake/reboot that Hollywood will jump on once the stubborn owners of the franchise die off. I just wonder how they'll manage the whole central plot line involving near-incest and a boy punching out another boy in order to protect a girl and win her heart.
Marty McFly will have to be a woman, likely black and gay/bi. Martina's equivalent-age father from the 90s being sexually aggressive towards her just isn't going to be as funny as the actual male Marty getting sexually assaulted by his equivalent-age mother from the 50s. Changing it to her mother could work for laughs and for the spectacle, but then the central plot being around getting her lesbian/bi/bi-curious mother to pair up with her father would probably not be acceptable to Hollywood.
07mk
12d ago
I would say that's likely doable, but it'd still take professional-level talent and effort to make a video that long that convincing.
07mk
15d ago
There is no way of proving or disproving it, since the claim is based around the SocJus notion of "privilege," which is fundamentally unfalsifiable. The claim that America is simply not ready for a black woman president isn't some categorical one about how no black woman could possibly win in 2024 due to there being too many sexist racists who would just refuse to vote for her. It's that a politician who is identical to Harris in every way except for being a white male would have won more points due to having to face less implicit bias from the media and the electorate, which would have translated to more votes going to this fictional man than the real Harris, with the gap accounting for the real Harris's loss to Trump.
Obviously, this is unfalsifiable.
Likewise, your history of voting for black men and/or white women would mean nothing to someone making this kind of claim, because, again, the claim isn't that you're one of the many vile American racists who would categorically vote against any black or female person. It's that, if these politicians were white and/or male, then you would have required less from them in order to convince you to vote for them. The fact that you voted for them even though they're black and/or female just proves how good of politicians they actually were, to overcome the biases you must have had against them and convince you to vote for them over someone more white and/or male. And that's before getting into the whole stuff about intersectionality where black women face bigotry in ways that are beyond merely combining the bigotry faced by black people and by women.
Again, obviously, this is unfalsifiable.
07mk
15d ago
Based on past performance, I would guess the worst case is the most likely one with a lot of confidence. However, past performance isn't always indicative of future performance, and I do have some hope that something like the best case will happen. Political success plays out almost entirely in votes, much like business success plays out almost entirely in profits, and if some tactic keeps losing you votes or profits, well, you can only keep following that tactic for so long before you run out of your accrued capital. 2024 may be the indication that this tactic has started to hit that breaking point; the sheer number and financial losses caused by the "woke" nature of a lot of media has added up to the point that some companies have begun to figure out that simply calling fans bigots isn't a viable corrective tactic. Perhaps the Democrats will also begin to figure this out about the electorate.
Depressingly, even taking into account all that, I'd still guess that the worst case is the most likely. It's so easy to see that any political party that actually cares about winning would choose the best case and avoid the worst case like the plague. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist, everyone knows that blaming people you don't like for your own failures is extremely seductive, even more seductive than blaming external circumstances, which is already very seductive, and everyone knows that blaming anyone other than yourself doesn't help much when it comes to improving oneself for the purpose of not repeating some failure from the past. Thus if people you like and respect are telling you that it's all the bad bigots' fault that you failed, you should be highly suspicious of the possibility that you're in an echo chamber that genuinely believes and tells you things that sound really nice to you, but which don't help you win in the future.
Which, I doubt the Republicans are any better on this, but the point of the Democratic party is that it's better than the alternatives. It's supposed to be the party of the educated and the empathetic, so much so that it actually knows the best interests of a significant portion of the population even better than they themselves do. If it can't even figure out its own best interests enough to know that any sort of blaming or placing of responsibility of failure outside of oneself is counterproductive for winning elections, then it calls into question why it's any better than the alternatives outside of simple sectarian allegiances.
07mk
15d ago
I thought this comment was a one-liner that was poking fun at the types of humor-policing busybodies that would unironically use a statement like "do better" in response to a harmless one-liner. The sub-thread that followed below indicates that I was mistaken. FWIW, I thought both one-liners were funny and added value to this forum. The sub-thread that followed, less so.
07mk
21d ago
But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.
I could express a sort of faux-bafflement at the blatant lack of self-awareness and/or hypocrisy in this paragraph, highlighted by the parts I bolded, but that would be dishonest at this point. I just find it depressing.
Because what's clear to me is happening here is that many posters have, in good faith, honestly concluded that the Democratic party and the larger culture that it's a part of are bad things, and that they were hoping that Scott's experience of being burned by this would lead him to correcting his own earlier delusions that they're not all that bad. When people laugh at supporters of the leopards-eating-people's-faces party for getting their faces eaten by leopards, the point being made isn't that these supporters should tribally go against the party that hurt them, it's that they should have recognized that leopards eating people's faces is just a bad thing that they shouldn't have supported in the first place. Sometimes, the person comes to this recognition once the consequences of such support become personally unavoidable; other times, the person looks at his daughter's torn-off face and offers up his other daughter face-first to the same leopard while other people praise him for proving that he's principled by taking a costly action.
Of course, it is tribal thinking to, in honest good faith, believe that leopards eating people's faces is wrong in a world in which a significant team exists that supports the leopards-eating-people's-faces party. A less tribal conclusion to this person's continued support would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that this whole cancel culture thing is all that bad, if someone who ostensibly got burned by it is still supportive of the exact same forces that led to him getting burned."
This is isomorphic to the honest good faith belief that Trump is just that bad of a person, bad of a leader, bad of a ward of democracy, etc. that he's a bad choice for POTUS. In the presence of such a major team with skin in the game that disagrees with this, a less tribal conclusion would be that, "Perhaps I ought to rethink my judgment that Trump is such an obviously or extremely bad choice for POTUS, or that my preferred choice for POTUS is any better."
Now, we can actually analyze these things non-tribally and try to conclude if the kinds of principles that led to the smearing of Scott is actually bad in comparison to how bad of a leader Trump is, as well as how much influences these things will have in the US depending on who's elected. I, for instance, think it's reasonable to conclude based on the fundamentals that Trump has demonstrated a lack of seriousness in how he governs through his first term, which works out mostly okay but which creates significant risk in emergencies, and this is worse than the emboldening effect that a Harris presidency would have on the people who brought forth the culture that led, among other things, to Scott getting smeared. But complaining about others being tribe-brained while also declaring that Trump is just so horrible is just trying to eat your cake and have it too. Either accept that other people can be just as tribal as you and come to the honest, good faith conclusion that [thing the other side likes] is actually horrible just like you have, or actually rise above the tribalism.
07mk
23d ago
We'd get more secure elections and, likely more importantly, the perception of more secure elections as judged by the electorate. And personally, "we," the people who agreed to take this costly action, would gain actual knowledge that wasn't there before, that we actually do care about fair elections and are not merely convincing ourselves that we care about fair elections.
07mk
23d ago
The big ones we’re missing are transparent boxes/individual envelopes and a full voting holiday. Sure, I’m in favor of both. I’m even fine with photo ID requirements. But they aren’t free, and I’d argue that they wouldn’t actually reduce the amount of bitching that goes on after an election. Trump and people like him will seize on the counting, the certification, any possible vector for sowing doubt. They have already baked into their worldview a far-reaching conspiracy against him, personally. That’s license to doubt even the most secure process.
I think this is precisely why something like this would be good to do. There are many people in power who agree with you and honestly, in good faith, believe that it won't actually appease Trump and his followers; if they went with it anyway, it would provide a truly costly signal to the electorate that they take election security seriously. So seriously, that they consider this kind of non-free step worth it even if it means submitting to demands from what they consider to be an irrational/cynical actor, thus increasing in the odds of someone irrational/cynical winning an election, in addition to both a reduction in their own status within their own peer groups and a reduction in the status of said peer group among various peer groups.
07mk
27d ago
The days of major news media sources paying generous salaries for skilled, intelligent investigators with deep knowledge of some beat and at least some sense of ethics are gone, maybe forever, with the drive to the bottom for advertising money.
I think skill/intelligence/expertise and having at least some sense of ethics are somewhat different with respect to salary levels. Certainly, it's easier to be ethical if you're well compensated, but I don't think having at least some sense of ethics when doing journalism requires some generous salary that is beyond the capabilities of these companies to pay now, and plenty of not-very-well compensated journalists (and other workers in general) can be and have been known to behave with at least some sense of ethics. If the lower budget to pay salaries means compromising on skills, intelligence, expertise, and ethics, among other things, they could have decided compromise less on ethics at the cost of compromising on other things, so that their journalists would have at least some sense of ethics, even if they weren't up to the same level of skill, intelligence, or deep knowledge of some beat as the other options.
Even the ownership seems to be mostly people who primarily want to either protect themselves from too-harsh criticism or use them as a weapon to attack their enemies, and so is willing to accept losses or much lower profits than a disinterested investor would expect.
I do think this is likely the biggest factor. It's hard to say exactly what determines how ethical any given journalist or individual in general would behave, but I think the leadership and company culture likely has a lot of influence, moreso than the budgets available for salaries.
07mk
27d ago
Well, I know there's some sort of "law" some political commentator coined, that says that any organization that's not explicitly right wing eventually becomes left wing. There are certainly enough examples that calling it a "law" doesn't seem obviously ridiculous.
The part I don't understand quite so well is why it happens to such an extreme extent like that 40% - 4% shift you say happened in journalism. From a purely cynical, selfish perspective, knowing the opposition better allows one to defeat them better - there's even a cliche saying, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," that alludes to this. So if I'm cynically running a left-wing organization in order to crush the right-wing, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers that we can learn from. From a good faith perspective of wanting to make the world a better place through leftist values and policies, it's obvious that blind spots develop when you're surrounded by people with similar values and beliefs. So if I'm a bright-eyed idealist running a left-wing organization in order to improve the world, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers to provide real, substantive criticism of the weaknesses and pitfalls of our values that I and people who agree with me can't recognize.
Which leads me to conclude that there are no real adults in the room, and everyone's just cynically aiming for the betterment of their own careers and status among peers, and if that results in their organization becoming ineffective or evil, then, well, hopefully that'll be after they've retired and the younger generations can deal with that.
This is the thought I had from seeing a related phenomenon in the field of entertainment, where over the past couple years, we've seen companies burn 8-10 figures in producing works like the films Indiana Jones 5 or The Marvels, TV shows Rings of Power or The Acolyte, video games Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Unknown 9: Awakening. I would have expected that the cynical selfish greedy decisionmakers at the top would have put a stop to it before all that money was sunk. But, well, it's not like it's their money - it's their investors' money - and even if they were to get fired, they at least gained status among their peers by greenlighting such things. That's the best I've come up with.
07mk
27d ago
I kind of agree here which is what makes this move so baffling. They know they’re not going to affect the outcome with this move, and they know that this kind of stupid reporting is only going to hurt their credibility.
Do they? What's the evidence that they're aware of the fact that this kind of thing would hurt their credibility? I remember as far back as 2016 during Trump's first campaign, I was among a tiny minority of Democrats complaining that there are more than enough honest ways to criticize and denigrate Trump, and that constantly reaching for hyperbole or even just lies would only hurt our ability to make any criticisms of him and other politicians in the future. We were shut down for "tone policing" or just ignored, and, sure enough, over the following 4 years of his presidency and continuing for 4 years after that, we've seen the trust in media keep going down. And the explanation for this has always been adding more epicycles about disinformation, Russian propaganda, low-information voters, and the like, instead of just owning up to the fact that when you don't speak credibly, your credibility declines in the eyes of the audience. At some point, when someone just keeps making the same obvious mistake over and over again that harms them, one has to conclude that, somehow, that mistake isn't that obvious or even understood by the person.
I also have to wonder if there's an evaporative cooling going on, where journalists who could recognize the constant self-destructive behavior of self-inflicted injuries to credibility that much of mainstream media engages in quit and did their own thing, and thus the ones remaining are only the most deluded ones.
07mk
27d ago
I don't know the sequence of steps, but it seems like you'd want to train a LORA, which I believe can be done using the popular Automatic1111 UI. As best as I can tell, Stable Diffusion 1.5 is still the most popular base model on which to build LORAs, but I think the tech exists for the more recent versions too. There are a decent amount of resources in the Stable Diffusion subreddit about this sort of stuff.
07mk
27d ago
They’ve already been calling Trump Hitler for 8 years. Why would it finally stick?
Indeed. I remember probably as far back as 2016, and certainly by 2018, joking that Democrats were calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" was considered trite. I don't know whether to even believe that this is something that counts as an "October surprise" due to how banal this is. If it's an actual attempt at a coordinated smearing, it speaks to an incredible level of incompetence in the Democratic party and its media supporters. A level of incompetence so great that I wouldn't have believed that it was possible until this year. Unfortunately, after what I've seen this year, it actually seems depressingly plausible that the top decisionmakers for a movement that believes that this election will literally determine life and death of democracy in America, thought that this would be an effective tactic.
I wouldn't characterize such a statement as conforming to that definition of "passing," though. It appears more like just jumping to conclusions, that the absence of people bringing it up is proof of the absence of people noticing, which is what determines "passing."
I mean, I can take your word for it, that some TRAs do use the term that way, but that seems clearly very different from the way people use the term when discussing CW issues, and not in quantity but rather quality. When people talk about "when trans person X passes," I don't think they tend to mean "when trans person X only interacts with or notices people who will treat them in a certain way," but rather "when trans person X presents in such a way as to meet some sort of threshold in how others perceive their gender."
We can design studies to make the true measure obscure from the participants. This is a common enough problem in such studies that it's fairly standard practice, and there are many ways to accomplish it, including just lying to the participants about what the study is actually about. Of course, it's questionable how effective such things are and they're all imperfect, but, also of course, all models are wrong, yet some are useful.
This seems quite possible to test as well, though likely quite difficult to do properly. One can measure physiological signs of discomfort, and one can also get assessments from test subjects that don't involve making decisions one way or another, but rather just the sense that they get. It's possible to quantify such things and then compare how they differ between different populations. There are many pitfalls to such efforts, and I certainly wouldn't trust the current academic apparatus to carry out such studies with enough rigor to draw any meaningful conclusions, though.
More options
Context Copy link