TokenTransGirl
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User ID: 3226
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
Further, my understanding is that some gay men intentionally spread it as much as possible
It really seems like you're focusing on the worst possible examples. This feels like blaming all conservatives for the tiny minority involved in school shootings. Do you really think you're learning useful things about the world by focusing on the worst 1% of a group? Do you feel that other groups should be held to a similar standard, even one's that you're a part of?
Just taking a quick look at an actual timeline here (https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline#year-1982)
May 31, 1982: The Los Angeles Times publishes the first front-page story on AIDS in the mainstream press: “Mysterious Fever Now an Epidemic.”
June 27, 1982: A gay activist group in San Francisco publishes the first pamphlet on “safer sex” and distributes 16,000 copies at the International Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade.
Does that really sound like a group that's trying to spread AIDS and opposed to restrictions on homosexual activity?
March 4, 1983: The report suggests that AIDS may be caused by an infectious agent that is transmitted sexually
9 months AFTER that safer sex pamphlet, science is finally confident that it might be sexually transmitted
October 24, 1986: CDC reports that AIDS cases are disproportionately affecting African Americans and Latinos.
Are you comfortable saying the same things about these groups as you are about homosexuals?
Going to another source: https://www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quilt
Does the AIDS memorial quilt really suggest a group that doesn't care about the consequences of their actions?
The contrast between the treatment of those opposed to lockdowns or vaccine mandates for COVID, and those who for selfish reasons actively spread an extremely lethal plague as widely as possible is my whole point here.
I don't get it - you seem opposed to lockdowns for spreading an airborne pandemic that threatens everyone near you, but you also seem to be advocating for lockdowns against a pandemic which only threatens sexual partners? What sort of quarantine actions were you expecting for AIDS? Do you really think "make gay sex illegal" is a reasonable policy position, and would you have also supported "ban all sex during COVID"?
For that matter, weren't there plenty of people selfishly spreading COVID? People who went to major events and caught flights, despite knowing they were feeling sick? Isn't that selfish behavior that we should want to punish?
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children*, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical.
Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative.
Are you saying your own Christian model deserves special recognition, or just the male-female union? In the latter case, couldn't we just as easily say "parental unions are the core building block of civilization", and focus on marriage as a parenting arrangement instead?
"change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life."
How were you planning to handle people from other countries? With the internet, your kid is going to be watching gay YouTubers and gay European TV shows - clearly you have to explain this concept to them at a fairly young age regardless of whether it's legal here?
There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin.
What does this have to do with marriage? Gay people can have as much sex as they want with or without marriage. I'd be shocked if getting gay married makes promiscuity go UP.
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
Do you have any actual source for that? The research I've seen from OKCupid seems pretty solid, since they've got actual back-end data from a platform that didn't encourage users to self-censor. That data all says that while there's a tiny percentage of rampantly promiscuous gays, 98% of homosexuals are within normal bounds: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/19/gay-men-promiscuous-myth
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
Would you consider conservatives dangerous, due to their behavior in spreading the Covid plague?
Have you considered that part of why AIDS was so dangerous, was because we didn't really have the concept of "AIDS" back then?
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
Employers can also create a platform that keeps a list of "unreliable employees" who just so happen to have participated in 2+ strike days, and collude to never hire these people. You don't have to bother going public, and of course you would never claim that they're striking, just "unreliable", which is obviously true. Carve out a half-assed exemption process for anyone who has a legally protected absence, to give yourself an extra fig leaf.
Or just pay one of your thousands of workers $100 for their login, so you know what's going on. Or have every employee install an app on their phone, then use that app to check for the evil union app. Keeping secrets amongst thousands of people with varied levels of commitment is not a problem anyone in the world has ever solved. Management's counter-attacks only need to be secret amongst a small group of especially invested people, so it's a deeply asymmetrical challenge.
You also lose all legal protections, since you're not actually a union, you're not legally declaring a strike, and so on. Which makes retaliation vastly easier, because they don't even need to find other excuses, they can fire you directly for this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that "coordinating to destroy a business" is even legal outside of a union/strike? I'd think if my employees all conspired to try and ruin me, I'd have a decent legal position to sue them.
All objections aside, it also seems like you could easily prototype it over email or something; you only really need a dedicated platform if you want to go big. If you really believe in the idea, you just need to find a group of workers willing to try it out. I really don't think it will go well, but it's absolutely an experiment you could run if you believe differently
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
My personal view on trans is neither here nor there, but for the record I think it’s a mental illness spread by social contagion (like anorexia).
I'd dare say that your personal views are extremely relevant. If you didn't view it as a mental illness, you wouldn't have anything to worry about.
Realistically, the best thing to do is probably try to explain it objectively: some people get tattoos, some people do drugs, and some people transition. I think TheBailey covers this fairly well.
Depending on your comfort with the alternatives, I'd also point out that men can absolutely wear dresses, play with dolls, and learn how to do makeup. Sometimes "trans" is really just "I want to play with my sister's cool toys". Usually this ends up just being a phase - the allure of the forbidden is a lot stronger, and also you start to realize there's social consequences unless you're majorly autistic (I'm mildly autistic, but I can definitely tell whether this sort of behavior is situationally appropriate)
That said, it's worth noting that transition is one of the safest, least-regretted medical decisions a person can make. Just don't rush into anything surgical and most of it is fairly easily undone. I can still easily pass as a guy if I'm in an area where being trans/female makes me feel unsafe. Even if you view it as a mental illness, the actual known-successful treatment IS "be chill and play along with their delusion."
(Not surprisingly, this is a topic I know a lot about, and am also wildly biased about - feel free to ask me questions, although I don't check the site super-regularly)
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
A lot of politics is literal life-or-death issues. If you ban an important medical procedure, people die. If you invite a bunch of criminals into small communities, the murder rate goes up, and people die.
Safer political stances still tie into this - taxes go up, families are poorer, now the kids don't get enough to eat. Or taxes go down, social services collapse, and now getting laid off is a death sentence.
Even the safest political stance still gets into tribalism - you support X, which "everyone knows" is aligned with our political enemies, so clearly you also support all of their other political stances.
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
If workers can discover the secret platform, so can employers; so the only real benefit is anonymity. The employer still knows people are organizing, approximately how many, and whether there are any planned Days Of Disruption.
If everyone is genuinely anonymous, you have no idea if there are a thousand workers on your side, or one very bored troll with a thousand accounts.
It's still pretty easy to punish everyone who was absent on the Days Of Disruption; you might get a few false positives, but employers don't seem inclined to mind that.
TokenTransGirl
1mo ago
It's pretty trivial to collect demographics. Google knows what IP address you used to visit YouTube, and that IP address pretty trivially traces back to a specific city. I'd expect YouTube makes this information available to content creators, since knowing your audience helps you tailor your content. Back when I was working with such tools, it was a pretty standard feature - even my tiny personal blog reports which countries I get visitors from.
I'd be more suspicious of social media making the same claims - as far as I know, Twitter doesn't provide any way to get that sort of information. It wouldn't be hard to build a 3rd party tool to calculate that data, but it would be relying on profiles listing a self-reported location.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
When it turns out to be true, will you commit to publicly acknowledging it?
Are all of the rest of you publicly committing to acknowledging it when it turns out that Skibboleth was right and it's all fake outrage? Or are you just trying to impose a double standard?
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
I appreciate the response and I'm glad I could clear stuff up. I don't mind a bit of combative when people are still willing to listen and continue the dialogue in good faith like you :)
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
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.
You asked me what I personally thought, and I assumed that meant you wanted to know how I use language in practice. When I am off in trans spaces, everyone uses "woman" to mean one thing, and I'm trying to be honest and open about that. That's it. I am explicitly acknowledging that "gender is a feeling" is a bailey: it is not a defensible position. I am explicitly acknowledging that "women are people who have/want a vagina" is my motte; it's the position I can actually defend.
I believe in something I can't defend: I can't prove that I "feel like a woman" but it doesn't mean that I don't. It would be dishonest to hide the fact that I do feel like a woman. But it would also be a different sort of intellectually dishonest to act like that's a defensible motte that I can reasonably expect other people to respect. All you have is my word, and there's certainly at least a few bad actors out there who are happy to parrot the same words.
I'm not even sure how I could pull a motte-and-bailey when I've got them marked out for your convenience like that?
I think I've been pretty clear about what definitions I'm asking about in any given conversation thus far. If I do slip up, I'm happy to clarify.
(Unlike a lot of trans activists, I also think we can use a little common sense and assume "only women can get pregnant" obviously refers to people with uteruses, even if I disagree and think we should call people women once they've got a vagina. I don't want to get bogged down in stupid semantic games when it's absolutely obvious what you mean by that sentence. I do not think we have any disagreement over who has large gametes, who has a uterus, or who can get pregnant.)
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
it's when doctors encourage body modification to express one's non-binariness that I'm starting to think that things are getting out of hand, and we need to put a stop to it.
That feels a bit oddly phased. Presumably it is the patient who is expressing a desire for this, and going through a fairly lengthy bureaucratic process - especially for anything non-binary. I don't think there's a bunch of doctors out there going "have you considered transition?" I would indeed find it super creepy for one's personal doctor to be offering recommendations like that unless the patient is listing off dysphoria symptoms.
That said, if someone knowingly undergoes surgery, and this routinely makes those people happier, I don't see any reason to stop it. I support people doing other forms of cosmetic surgery, getting tattoos, etc.. My general understanding is that very few people regret these surgeries, partly because there is still generally a lengthy bureaucratic process weeding out anyone doing this on a whim. If it makes them happy, why not?
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Words have multiple definitions, yeah. I think one can draw a reasonable consensus at "a woman is someone with a vagina", but I personally, in my head, use it to mean "someone in the ma'am cluster." If we are arguing about how you categorize people, I feel unreasonable imposing my personal definition. But if you ask me how I personally categorize people, I want to be honest about the system I'm actually using.
I don't think there's anything invalid with the category "people who want to use female pronouns". We can talk semantics about circular reasoning and all of that, but at the end of the day it seems very obvious that some people are delighted by "ma'am" and some people are extremely offended by it. Do you have some problem with me, personally, calling Samantha a woman and saying she/her?
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Chrome seems to be pushing in a strong anti-ad-blocker direction lately, so I'm on Firefox.
On the rare occasions I need to search for something, it's usually a Google search using "site:reddit.com" to eliminate SEO spam. I haven't seen any real gains using alternative search engines, and Google is at least familiar.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
I think that if you want to convince people that Communism is bad, the best way to do that is to explain that Socialism is something else entirely. My general experience is that people want a social safety net and some degree of regulation, but once you explain the idea of leaving The Government in charge they at least realize they don't want The Other Side to ever gain that sort of power. There's also a huge wealth of historical examples to work from, here.
Now, if you want to convince people that Socialism is bad, that's a very different conversation...
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Once she's made this clear to you, do you continue referring to her as a woman? Or no?
I mean, personally, I'm not harmed at all by her. I personally have no objections to this. I'll call her "she/her" and Samantha, because it seems rude to do otherwise. My mental classification will be "female" because to me female just means "person I refer to as she/her".
Other women have expressed that, for instance, they would not be comfortable dating Samantha because of it. I think that's reasonable.
If Samantha goes on a rant about how people are transphobic for not dating her, just because she has a penis, I will think she's full of shit and making the rest of us look bad.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one a little horrified by those :)
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Well, keep in mind: I know thousands of trans women online. That's a lot of evidence that it is successful. So any study has to overcome my prior, and explain why there's a huge cluster of visibly-happy trans women, but I never meet any of these people who regret it. I'm the sort of trans woman who wanders onto The Motte and TERF forums and so forth, and I have yet to encounter any such cluster. (There's certainly a few, of course)
I'm also referring to actual studies when I say we feel happier, so you'd have to reconcile why the two studies disagreed.
But, yeah, if 10% of trans women regret it, I think we maybe need to tighten up the gates a little bit, or at least make that warning a LOT clearer within the community. If 50% regret it, I think I'd have to spend a few days seriously reconsidering my world view.
This is all assuming actual regret, too. Right now, "happiness" is a bit tricky to measure: Maybe someone gained 100 happiness points from transitioning, but lost 150 because now they're subject to a lot more bigotry. I think in that case, the right solution is to fix the cultural bigotry, not to block transition.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
I think a lot of trans women genuinely fall into the older, classic model like me. It's really hard to say if it represents the actual community, because there's some loud voices that want to make the newest ideology the only one, but I do think there's a lot of people like me, and still are, even if we're no longer the majority within the trans community. I think there's a lot more of us than you'd guess, simply because we tend to be quiet: we already got what we want, as long as we don't draw attention to ourselves.
I have a bit of trouble taking someone seriously as a "trans woman" if they just want to self-identify, don't have dysphoria, and aren't even taking HRT, but... I'm asking people who don't believe I'm a woman to call me "she/her" anyway, so I'm at least fine with names and pronouns even there.
If we accept the idea that I want to have a cis-woman looking body despite not being born with one, it doesn't really surprise me that some people might want "non-binary" mixes. I don't really understand the category well myself, though. I think a lot of non-binary is much more about abolishing gender roles entirely - most cis women I meet who identify as "non-binary" just seem unhappy with society's concept of "female", or are viewing that concept through a fairly narrow lens. All that said, if you're actually going out and getting surgery, I'm going to take you seriously.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
I'm aware of your spirituality - but I'm equally aware of mine. I believe that Jesus supports my decision, and that if he were here today he would "cure" me by making me indistinguishable from a cis woman. I'm no stranger to this being called a mental illness, either because someone doesn't agree that "Jesus" exists or because someone doesn't agree that "gender" exists. It seems like a fair equivalence myself - I'm asking you to have faith in some internal truth of mine that I can't prove to your satisfaction.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Sorry, I'm having a dozen slightly different conversations, and it can be hard to keep track of them. My point on urinals is that merely seeing a penis is not harmful. I have seen vastly more penises in the men's bathroom than I have seen in any other context. Stadiums and those big trough urinals are especially awful here. There are a lot of penises on display, even if supposedly no is trying to "show off."
I also, separately, think you're wrong about how often guys do enjoy showing off, but maybe I just got unlucky growing up. The core point is that people routinely have their entire dick out and exposed, and strangers are going to accidentally see a bunch of penises in there whether they want to or not. Maybe not every time you pee, but over a lifetime you're certainly going to see a lot more cocks than if we didn't have urinals. Some bathroom designs are certainly better here, but if we actually cared about privacy I dare say we could do a lot better.
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Alright, well, if we agree on that then cool. Not much else to say :)
TokenTransGirl
2mo ago
Well, you're consistent at least. I do think a realistic assessment of health ought to look at happiness a fair bit more, though. I was never going to reproduce for a variety of reasons, so I think it's totally reasonable to trade that off for happiness. I think people have plenty of hobbies that make them happy, despite being dangerous: they drive cars, they drink alcohol, they eat badly.
On a spiritual level... I'm not much for formal churches and whatnot, but as best as I can tell, my soul, my connection to the divine, wanted me to do this. I trust it, because when I was even younger, it held me back and said no, you're not ready to do this yet, and looking back I think it was right.
But there is a difference between getting a hormone treatment to treat your mental illness and trying to make everyone else in society believe your mental illness.
Plenty of people are spiritual, and plenty of people think it's a mental illness. I'm spiritual myself, but I still expect the people in the latter category to try and show some respect for people of faith.
Alright, let's take a simple example: Australia.
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
(source: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/covid-19-mortality-australia-deaths-registered-until-31-january-2024)
It seems kinda baffling to say conservative policy didn't cause anyone to die when their policy decision caused the death rate to go 10x.
I think we can reasonably extrapolate from Australia to other nations: maybe not as extreme, but you can tell when conservative policies won out again and again, because each time there's suddenly a bunch more dead people. You can perhaps argue about tradeoffs, but that's not what you said. You said "I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague". I dare say policy decisions are a Conservative behavior
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
... are you really being intellectually rigorous here? If we take that 90% immunity figure at face value, it saved millions of lives. What side effects, exactly, are so severe as to compare to "millions of lives saved"?
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years. So Covid is twice as lethal per year. That's not factoring in the fact that we had 40 years of medical advancements to help us combat Covid, whereas we had absolutely no clue what AIDS was for the first two years. That is an absolutely huge difference in our technology and ability to respond - I imagine if we'd had the AIDS vaccine 2 years in, the story would be vastly different
(Also not factoring in that the US has been below-average for AIDS for decades, or that the worst-hit region for AIDS is Africa)
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