FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3hr ago
The public rehabilitation of Bush Jr. is one of the oddest things I've witnessed in my lifetime. It would be easy to assume there's some kind of statute of limitations element to it, but that doesn't seem to be the case: Reagan seems just as despised as ever.
FtttG
3hr ago
btw, what's a good word here? "terrorist" is too harsh a word, but "protestor" too weak, since they actively block and interfere with basic government work.
"Obstructor"?
In the EU, there's a concept called the "right to be forgotten", intended to recognise the idea that a crime or misdemeanour which one committed a long time ago and for which one has served one's sentence should not haunt one forever. There is a legal precedent that you can appeal to Google to remove articles containing your name from search results, and in some cases they will honour this request (funny story: several years after leaving school, a guy who was the year ahead of me in secondary school was convicted for possession of large amounts of illegal drugs which could not possibly have been solely for personal use, and in his trial his actual defense was that he was not a drug dealer, but simply a "sucker for a good deal". At some point after his conviction was spent he must have requested all articles about the case be purged from Google search results, because I can no longer find them.) As with anything else, this has its limitations: in the UK, sex offenders are forbidden from changing their names via deed poll. If an adult was convicted of a sexual offense involving children, I do think it's reasonable that this information be made publicly available, especially if they're seeking employment involving children. Likewise if someone was convicted of a severely violent offense and they're seeking employment in a job that involves safeguarding.
But broadly speaking, I'm sympathetic to the idea that, if a person has a mental health episode in a public place, or if a university student has too much to drink and makes a fool of themself, that incident should not follow them around for the rest of their life. It should not be the first thing you see when you Google their name. I agree with Jacobin that police officers uploading bodycam footage of this sort of thing to their official YouTube channels is an improper use of bodycam technology, but really, police bodycam footage is only the tip of the iceberg. Whenever anyone has a mental health episode in a public place, you can be assured that smartphone footage of it from at least three angles will be uploaded to TikTok and Instagram within the hour. Videos like "Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired" being uploaded to official police YouTube channels are only a symptom of a broader cultural problem: everything is just #content now. Woman having a mental health episode in a supermarket? #content. The building you're inside catches fire? #content. Man gets struck by car? #content. Soldier stabbed to death by Islamist nutters? #content.
The canonical example of the casual sociopathy of bystanders is Kitty Genovese, a case which was widely misrepresented by sensational journalists. In light of this, it ought to be retired in favour of any of the above examples.
Scott talked about this in 2013 ("Not Just a Mere Political Issue"), even using the same example you gave of how opposition to gay marriage is seen as verboten in a way that other, more obviously consequential opinions aren't.
They must be rooted out an expelled from society, because even the smallest Nazi presence will irresistibly grow and take over if left unchecked.
And in the next breath, they'll assert that slippery slopes are a "fallacy".
I got into an argument with a person on Facebook who was defending his decision to compare ICE to the SS and the Gestapo. When arguing that such a comparison was not in the least bit hyperbolic and distasteful, he pointed out that ICE have killed 40 people since the beginning of January 2025.
Assuming that figure is accurate, I find it profoundly disquieting that this person apparently thinks that killing 40 North or South Americans is morally equivalent to killing 6 million Jews. What the hell kind of exchange rate is that?
#1 is a coherent view that I disagree with, but it seems you hold.
It would be more accurate to say that I believe sex is a real thing, and that "gender" (and "gender identity") is a meaningless and incoherent concept unworthy of discussion. It's not that I think gender is a meaningful idea, but that it's not the place of the courts to debate it: it's that I don't think the courts should be passing comment on a completely meaningless concept in the first place. As a society, we've been collectively talking about this "gender" concept for decades, but I've yet to come across a simple, cogent, concise and non-circular definition of what the word actually means, and what it means to have a "gender identity" of x.
It is a simple scientific fact that every mammal must have a male parent and a female parent. The identity of one's biological parents is of paramount importance in a range of medical and genealogical context.
By contrast, there is no similar requirement that every mammal must have one parent of each gender identity. In recognition of this basic biological fact (and for the sake of consistency with how the word is used when talking about every species other than humans) I think it's more appropriate if, in the context of genealogy, the words "father" and "mother" are used to refer to individuals of a specific sex only.
You might say that the litigant in this case only wants to be referred to as the child's "mother" and would have no objection to being referred to as the child's "male parent". And I think you're attempting to sanewash the trans activist movement. I think this man would object just as strenuously to being described as the child's "male parent" as he would to being described as the child's "father". 100% of the time when a "moderate" trans activist announces that they're not engaging in science denialism and they're just calling on everyone to acknowledge the distinction between sex and gender – within a matter of minutes, a trans person will invariably show up to assert that, no, I really am "female" and it's dehumanising to describe me as "male".
(This is why I find this case corrosive to scientific fact and sense-making. In the case of adoptive parents, an adult simply wishes to be recognised as a child's primary caregiver, while still acknowledging the adults who are the child's biological parents. This is different: the litigant is the child's male biological parent, but wants to be legally recognised as not being the child's male biological parent. His claim is that this child does not have a male biological parent. You can talk about "recognising the distinction between sex and gender" til the cows come home, but I think we both know what he would say if the question was put to him point blank.)
Even in your example of how the words "father" and "mother" are used to refer to adoptive rather than biological parents, I don't really think this has anything to do with your mystical concept of "gender". Rather, the word "father" traditionally had two meanings:
- An individual's parent of the male sex.
- An individual's primary caregiver of the male sex.
Typically these two entities would be the same person, but we acknowledged various instances in which they would not be, as in the case of adoption. But I think it's blatant historical revisionism to claim that, when we refer to an adoptive parent as a child's father, this is in reference to his performing the "gendered role" of a father or whatever. On the contrary, I would say that referring to an adoptive parent as a "father" would be historically understood to mean "despite the fact that the child is not his biological offspring, this individual serves as this child's primary caregiver, and this individual is of the male sex". "Gender" or "gender roles" or how the man "identifies" simply wouldn't enter into the discussion at all.
FtttG
18hr ago
I was very confused at first since I thought chuffed meant angry, but it means the opposite, so I've been misinterpreting a bunch of speakers of British English for an unknown amount of time.
I have a helpful mnemonic video for you.
I was referring to the fact that the categories of "male/female" are so basic and obvious, they are hard to define. And that people just think of them as primitive concepts in practice - you gave a definition (and it is a good one!), but I doubt you ever thought of man/woman needing a definition prior to gender ideology.
Incorrect. The differences between men and women are taught to children at a very young age, in the form of "mummy has a baby in her tummy". I think the average five-year-old child could reliably explain the key difference between the sexes: women can have babies, and men can't. And I'm sure the average five-year-old child could reliably do this long before Judith Butler was born. As they get older the definition these children use will get a bit more precise and granular to account for edge cases (not all women can have babies, some women had babies but no longer can etc.) but the basic concept of sexual dimorphism is understood from a very young age.
I explained my definition of gender identity immediately after asserting it's existence and the corresponding language changes.
Did you? If so, I missed it. I'm reading your comment again, and the best I can find is this:
I define a new sort of identity marker (next to stuff like race, sex, age, etc) called "gender identity" (or "gender" for short). This is a redefinition of the old concept of gender.
That... isn't a definition. At best it's an IOU for a definition. "Gender identity is a redefinition of the old concept of gender." "Psawdo identity is a redefinition of the old concept of psawdo". Do you see how this doesn't provide me with any insight into what "psawdo identity" is? Even when I was in primary school, I was told that, when defining a word, you can't use that word in the definition. It amazes me that so many proponents of gender ideology have yet to grasp this basic fact: when defining a word, if you use that word in the definition, it renders the definition circular and hence useless.
Ok, this is a good point. I will then amend my definition (I have edited my original comment) of [gender] to mean "wanting to be like [sex] in most regards".
So we can still have a trans woman with a penis, as long as she wants to be a female in most other ways, like wearing dresses, being perceived as a female, etc
How many "regards" must this trans woman be "like" before she qualifies as a woman? Are these "regards" weighted in any way, or are they each assigned a value of 1? ("Well, Jo is a vicious rapist and a domestic abuser – but he likes astrology and wears skirts sometimes, so I'm calling it a wash.") Who is entitled to make that judgement? If you're interacting with a male person on the internet who has a penis, but they assert that their name is Sheila and their pronouns are she/her, does it therefore follow that you shouldn't play along until after you have verified that Sheila "wants" to be a woman in most regards? ("Send pics or I won't respect your preferred pronouns.")
As an aside, I have it on good authority that trans women don't owe me femininity, so when a bearded man with a penis wearing jeans and a T-shirt calls himself a woman, I'm meant to just go along with that or I'm a hateful Nazi fascist TERF bigot who deserves to be decapitated.
You seem to conflate changing definitions with changing the underlying meaning of statements and lying.
Yes, I do, because it is. To quote myself:
Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.
This is one of my biggest problems with gender ideology. Its proponents claim that they just want to redefine words to be more inclusive of trans people. But they don't. They want to muddy the waters such that the old words (like "woman", "mother" and "girl") no longer denote female people only, but still retain the positive connotations people have for those words. Because if you're a bad actor, passing yourself off as a good person is a vital strategy. Bad actors who are trans are not hoping to redefine the word "woman" such that everyone who hears it thinks "a person of unspecified sex but a female gender identity". No: they are hoping that when people refer to them as "women", people make the same statistical assumptions of them as they would make of a given female person (e.g. physical strength, aggression, propensity for violence, propensity to commit rape and sexual assault). The strategy is glaringly obvious when you recognise that trans activists make it perfectly clear they want both definitions in circulation at the same time, allowing them to strategically equivocate between the two as needed. Gender ideology's drive to "redefine" words (by which they really mean "add secondary definitions to words already in use") is just a big motte-and-bailey:
Frankly, I think the two definitions of "woman" you're using (one commonsense and straightforward, the other postmodern and controversial) amount to a motte-and-bailey fallacy, and I don't like motte-and-bailey fallacies on general principle.
If you said "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman", I would think that definition was incoherent and circular - but at least I'd know exactly what you meant when you used the term "woman" in conversation. If you said "a woman is a person with female reproductive organs", I would likewise know exactly what you meant whenever you used that term.
But if the single word means both of those things, then that gives you a blank cheque to jump back and forth between the definitions on a whim according to the needs of the moment, depending on who you're trying to persuade and what rhetorical point you're trying to make.
To return to my earlier analogy: if a public official exclusively used the word "year" to refer to a single rotation around the sun, that's fine. If he uses it exclusively to refer to 756,667 rotations around the sun, that's also fine. But if he uses both definitions, jumping back and forth depending on the needs of the moment, the rhetorical point he's making and the audience to whom he is speaking: then I can no longer trust any sentence that comes out of his mouth that contains the word "year", any more than I can trust Bill Clinton's claims not to have had "sexual relations" with Ms. Lewinsky.
So I ask you this: are you really advocating redefining the word "woman" such that it only refers to "a person of either sex with a female gender identity"? Or are you advocating that it mean that in addition to its traditional meaning of "an adult female human, regardless of gender identity"?
Actually, I don't even need to ask you – that's what your comment history is for!
- "Every "non-binary" I know of is either a woman or a male homosexual" – is it fair to say that when you used the word "woman" here, you were referring to female adults? If the word "woman" means "a person with a female gender identity", then by definition no "woman" can be non-binary.
- "...what if a normal woman literally decided, against common sense, to walk around in a bad part of town at night in a miniskirt alone?" – what did you mean by "normal woman", in this context?
- "Eleanor is a (White) woman. Her flaws are being lecherous, loud, rude, and gluttonous. Generally she just acts as the oppposite of a woman... Janet is a (White) woman..." – in the former case you assert that a woman who acts as the opposite of a woman is still a woman, but in this comment, the one I'm replying to, you're claiming that a person who acts as a member of the opposite sex "in most regards" therefore becomes the opposite gender. Which one is it?
- "Also the person who said it was a woman (in the normal sense of the word: an AFAB, uterus-haver, etc)" – well, that just gives the whole game away, doesn't it? You're perfectly willing to use the word "woman" in the "normal sense of the word" when it's rhetorically convenient. You aren't actually committed to "redefining" the word "woman": you just want to tack on a secondary definition on to the "normal" meaning so that you don't subjectively feel like a liar when making an assertion like "Karen White is a woman".
- "... I would view it the same to a heterosexual male gynaecologist treating an attractive young woman." – Gynaecologists do not treat people of either sex who happen to have female "gender identities": they treat female people exclusively (despite Jonathan Yaniv's protestations), without regard for their "gender identity". By definition, heterosexual males are attracted to female people, not to male people who purport to have female gender identities (much to trans incels' chagrin). Thus, the only context in which "a heterosexual male gynecologist treating an attractive young woman" might raise an eyebrow would be if the word "woman" refers to "female person" and not to "person of either sex with a female gender identity". Yet another example of your being perfectly willing to use the word "woman" in the "normal sense of the word" when it's convenient.
Now that I think about it, even this comment, the one to which I'm replying, is internally contradictory. If you define "woman" as "a person with a female gender identity", and a "female gender identity" is the state of "wanting to be a woman in most regards" – again, it's just circular, isn't it? It never bottoms out at anything.
Suffice to say that your attempted "steelman" of gender ideology has left me no less confused than I was before reading it, and no less convinced that it's just a fundamentally incoherent belief system from top to bottom. Honestly, I get the impression that even you don't fully understand this belief system or what it entails (just like Freddie deBoer).
I'm chuffed that my deadlift is about the same as yours, but if it's any consolation, my squat and my bench are dramatically lower (in freedom units, 198 and 160 lbs respectively).
FtttG
22hr ago
The weights I'm doing are just embarrassingly low.
What's your PR, out of interest?
FtttG
1d ago
Is that something you can go to by yourself?
Absolutely, do it bro. Impress some girl with your spice tolerance.
FtttG
1d ago
Is it your opinion that, for all of human history, when people used the word "father", they were only referring to the parent who had a masculine gender identity, irrespective of which reproductive organs that parent had? And that, coincidentally, we use the same word to refer to the male parent in animal husbandry, even though animals (so far as we can tell) have no conception of gender identity?
I mean, this is a pretty radical act of historical revisionism, you must admit.
FtttG
1d ago
For most people in most of human history, the word "father" refers to individuals of a particular sex, not individuals of a particular gender identity. Therefore, it is the common definition, the definition used in common parlance. The people using it in the nonstandard way you recommend are a minuscule minority, and there are hundreds of millions of living people for whom the question "does the word 'father' refer to the male parent, or the parent with a masculine gender identity?" would simply be incoherent. If you think the standard definition is deficient, you're welcome to argue in favour of your own, but it's rather obnoxious of you to pretend that everyone's already using your definition and that I'm the weird one because I understand the word "father" to mean "the male parent" and not "a parent with a masculine gender identity".
Precedent from times when there was no distinction made between sex and gender is totally meaningless for answering this question.
On the contrary, I think it demonstrates just how recent and faddish this worldview is. Only a tiny minority of currently living humans currently believe this is a distinction worth litigating, and dozens if not hundreds of countries manage just fine without.
FtttG
1d ago
New year's resolutions check-in (nice that I can actually start crossing off resolutions I've completed):
- Went to the gym three times last week, again yesterday evening, planning to go at lunchtime today. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
- Managed to go the entirety of January without consuming any alcohol, fast food or fizzy drinks, though I was back at it like a demon from midnight on February 1st.
- Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
- Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
- Practised guitar for roughly an hour every day in January.
How goes it, @thejdizzler and @oats_son?
FtttG
1d ago
About a third of the way through my fourth draft, and I've cut out about 4,500 words.
FtMs have a vastly easier time passing as male far more than MtFs can female.
One thing I find interesting is that basically every trans-identified female I know moves in nerdy circles (D&D, board games etc.). In these circles, you're much less likely to clock a TiF, because plenty of the actual males are short with narrow shoulders and reedy, nasal voices.
FtttG
1d ago
But when someone has a stereotypically feminine appearance, one generally assumes they are female and treats them as a woman, no?
Yes, but this is a heuristic, not a definition.
Definition: A woman is an adult female human; that is, a person born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes (even if faulty).
Heuristic: You can usually identify a woman by sight on the basis of her height relative to men and various secondary sexual characteristics (narrow shoulders, wide hips, breasts, vocal pitch etc.).
A heuristic is a useful guide to identifying something, or to distinguishing X from Y, but every heuristic is prone to error to a greater or lesser extent (tall women and short men exist, as do women with deep voices or flat chests). A definition, by contrast, is supposed to be, well, definitive, clearly delineating the members of the set X from the members of the set Y with zero room for ambiguity. If you mistake a member of set X for a member of set Y, then this demonstrates a limitation of the heuristic: it does not necessarily imply any limitation of the definition.
I agree with @The_Nybbler that this is an ahistorical reading. The Nazis did not kill Jews because they were "dissenting" (indeed, the Nazis killed cooperative Jews: see part V here) – they killed them because they were Jews.
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