WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
Your last paragraph doesn't follow from the rest of your post - indeed, it seems at odds with it. The transableism guys are claiming they deserve accommodation because their wacky desire is a mental condition isomorphic to gender dysphoria. The problem very much isn't that we've become unwilling to call these things mental illness! I say that neither should be classified as mental illness. Gender reassignment should be classified as elective plastic surgery, not treatment for an illness. This is what a principled stance for personal autonomy should yield, and cuts through all the bullshitting about suicide risks.
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
Your overall point is correct, but:
If you count defiant transitioners as part of your control group, it biases your study in favour of transition, because defiant transitioners amount to "transition with a bunch of extra annoyance" and as such are near-guaranteed to do worse than the transition group regardless of how good or bad transition is.
That's not necessarily true: suppose transition, even with transition-with-extra-annoyance, always leads to strictly better outcomes. The control group will then have better outcomes if the defiant transitioners are counted than if they aren't, possibly on par with transitioners within margins of error depending on how many there are and how much the extra annoyance impacts outcomes.
This point aside, I also think any study of this sort would need extremely careful design to separate the effects of social transition vs the actual puberty blockers. I think you'd need two control groups: one where the kids socially transition but don't take puberty blockers, and one where they don't transition either way. And while it's very easy to tell if somebody's been taking unsanctioned hormones, it's rather harder to tell if they switched pronouns among friends, so you really couldn't run a study like that with participants who don't play fair.
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
This is a very stranger take. Children very much have a concept of being a boy or a girl, and are aware of grownups being men or women. Also, "minors" doesn't just mean hapless little six-year-olds who don't know about the birds and the bees. A fourteen or fifteen-year-old is a very different matter.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Couldn't Trump & al try forcing appointments, as the middle solution?
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Yes, this is more or less right. I've certainly encountered endorsement of something like this in left spaces. "It kinda sucks, but the right decided to make women's sports a battlefield of the greater societal conflict about What A Woman Is. Making sure they don't win that fight is of existential importance and takes precedence over concerns about the short-tem fairness of competitive sports". Personally I wish we'd settled on advocating for "let's rename them XX League and XY League". It seems more principled. Harder to turn into a slogan, though.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I think the disconnect is that representation advocates don't want proportional representation of the general population demographics — what they want is aspirational representation for every minority. The hope is for every black (etc. etc.) child to have just as many black characters in fiction to daydream about being when they grow up that a white child has. From that framing, no single demographic can be "over"-represented until each slice has exactly as many performers as every other.
(The above is an explanation, not an endorsement. Mind you, I would actually quite like to see Idris Elba as James Bond, but more in a race-blind-casting this-guy-is-really-good kind of way. Besides he's probably too old now.)
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
if people March with Nazi flags, the right will scream at every opportunity from every available microphone, on every podcast and blog that they don’t support this nonsense.
Scott Aaronson keeps rightly lambasting Musk for not doing this about the salute thing.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Spending the first 20 pages going over the problematic beginnings of railways as a tool of capitalism and facilitator of imperial conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples, funded by the capital created by the transatlantic slave trade, only to tepidly conclude that despite this legacy the idea can be rescued to create a more equitable future... what?
Presumably the author wrongly expected that these sorts of counterarguments were the main objections that he had to advocate against? So obviously you start with what you believe the opposition to believe already, and then you refute it.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I'm not saying they'll be systematically better at taking care of their health, just that something big and loud akin to "yo, lead point is bad for you" might emerge and filter out into popular consciousness to the point they'd be horrified at the 2025 lifestyle for that alone.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
It's only in a democracy that every man must have an opinion on such matters
Surely not? In any era, save some totalitarian hell-scape, I can still use my own judgement to determine if I, personally, am going to take up smoking/let a quack saw up my leg/give the wise-woman's herbal remedy a try. Renaissance, medieval, even ancient literature is full of jokes about doctors prescribing unpleasant/harmful treatments which clearly don't work just to look like they know what they're talking about, and characters rightly giving them a hard pass after the application of a bit of common sense.
The more interesting question is if it really matters that much outside of academic affairs or outside of a political regime that derives its legitimacy from public opinion
Health seems like the big one. It makes a personal difference to your quality of life and lifespan whether you believe that lead paint is safe, whether you believe that vaccines are good for you, etc. I expect that the biggest thing our descendants are likely to shake their heads at is some benign part of everyday life in the developed world which will have been exposed as having dire long-term consequences on the human body. The "microscopic lithium contamination is causing obesity" people are probably wrong, but something like that.
This seems a very silly way to look at it. Say I travel to Canada, and I have a cousin there. He lets me crash on his couch because he is my cousin. We have dinner together. I offer to help with the dishes, because, after all, I'm the one who got half of them dirty so it's only fair. Am I "working" for my cousin? Is he paying me by letting me sleep on his couch? Of course not. My cousin would have let me stay over even if I'd bailed out on the washing dishes; in fact he wouldn't have needed help with the dishes if my presence hadn't gotten extra dishes dirty. Even to the extent that my track record of being a helpful houseguest might be a factor in him allowing me to stay, it's not as if he'd let a perfect stranger come to his house in exchange for that minimal amount of "housekeeping", or as if there's some citizen he would be paying normal wages for that work if I hadn't stepped up. Come on. In no universe should this be any kind of violation. It's pure chicanery.
(Or are you saying that, while the above is innocent, we need to outlaw it anyway in order to 'catch' some rampant problem of criminals who are in fact becoming unauthorized housekeepers for perfect strangers in exchange for room and board in the US? I suppose that would be less insane. But also, fuck it. Letting some people functionally enslave themselves on the margins is worth not outlawing basic politeness as a houseguest. To the extent it might be happening, I still don't believe it's a blight on the economy that warrants making regulations such a PITA for ordinary people who want to pull their weight with their hosts.)
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
To have a meaningful discussion you need to be able to specify the parameters of the debate, and draw meaningful conclusions, and a circular definition doesn't allow for that.
I honestly, literally, don't understand this point. What discussion do you want to have? I rather thought the debate was "what will the consequences be for society of anyone were to accept the trans definition of woman, and would they be acceptable?". This seems to me to be a debate that we can have perfectly well even if the definition is circular. It would mean something for everyone on the planet to agree to call anyone who wants to be called Mrs 'Mrs', etc. etc. We can hazard guesses about what would proceed from it, and value judgments about whether those results are desirable. Where's the issue?
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
In what sense is switching the polarity on which side gets systematically silenced "a good thing for free speech"? I'm very sympathetic to the view that the status quo is very far from free speech, and this is bad, but if your proposed solution is "censor another set of political beliefs" then you aren't restoring free speech. And maybe it's worth doing anyway, if, say, you decide free speech is a lost cause anyway, and that restoring conservative discourse is important in itself. But don't pretend you're restoring free speech by doing so. "Removing [half the political compass] from college campuses is a good thing for free speech" is a hilariously self-contradictory statement on the face of it.
I'm not saying it's all good or that the guy shouldn't get heat over it, just that in practical terms this isn't necessarily a massive security hole that Chinese spies could walk into by the dozens.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
if we don't settle on a definition, or insist on a circular one,
You're doing it again! I still don't understand the problem with the circular definition. Why can't we have a circular definition? What makes it unacceptable or unworkable? Why can't we debate the merits of a world where we use that definition vs. whatever your preferred norms are?
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working". It seems the letter of law may prohibit it, but that's absurd and clearly not the same thing as people who sneak in to get actual paying jobs. The standard for deportation should be proving that the individual received wages for something, not just that they did vaguely work-like activities in their free time.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?
I figure this only happened because Goldberg was already in Waltz's contacts and he selected the wrong name by mistake. Maybe had a brainfart and mixed him up with somebody else who did belong in the chat - maybe just clicked the wrong option in a slide. Who knows. Either way, not that big of a security concern unless there are foreign spies on Waltz's speed-dial.
That's an actual non-circular definition that refers to attributes external to itself.
I don't understand why this matters if the attributes are trivia about molecular biology. Why can't the definition be self-referential? You keep saying it can't, but you haven't actually said why this is a problem! It's not a problem that the social norm as to who gets called "Bill" is "people who tell you 'Call me Bill'". Why should it be a problem for the social norm as to who gets called "Mrs" to be "people who tell you 'Call me Mrs'"?
And I don't "want a man who puts on a dress to be called a woman", I want anyone who asks to be called a woman to be called a woman whether they wear a dress or pants or a spacesuit. The contextual attributes, being ultimately subjective, simply explain why as a matter of fact someone might want to be called a woman, particularly. Compare: "Bill" has social connotations relative to "William", explaining why a William might prefer to be known as Bill, but that doesn't mean that only people who match the vibe that "a guy called Bill" evokes in a vacuum are allowed to ask that people call them Bill.
Other useful point of reference: "transwoman" itself, separate from whether you think a trans woman counts as "a woman". Surely you don't think "transwoman" is a meaningless term lacking a proper definition. You see perfectly well what we've been talking about all throughout this thread, there's no ambiguity, no case where you'd be helpless as to say whether WandererintheWilderness would consider a given person "a trans woman" or not. And yet - how else would you define it than "someone who identifies as a trans woman"?
Ultimately, I'm just being kind. I want people to get what they want, I want them to get to be who they want to be. Or try, anyway. Pursuit of happiness and all that. You want to talk about sophistry, it's the gender-criticals' harping on about the definition problem which strikes me as in bad faith. The trans usage of "woman" or the pronoun "she" are using those words in perfectly understandable ways that don't misrepresent the physical facts of their biology, any more than calling a boat "she" implies it has breasts: it uses "woman" as the supercategory including both "cis woman" and "trans woman". It's only a shift in language, not a lie or factually incorrect or whatever nonsense. And with that established, I see no other valid reason whatsoever why trans people shouldn't be called what they want to be called. Talk of tides all you want, I don't think cruelty will ultimately prevail. I've got more faith in human nature than that.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Charging people money to tattoo them is obviously work, it should not have been permitted.
Was she charging people? OP just said she was carrying her gear. I don't see why she should be forbidden from doing it for free, as a hobby, even if she gets paid for it at home. I feel like the line here ought to be "did they get paid", not "were they doing things that other people might get paid for in other circumstances", particularly when it comes to artists.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Yeah there's the definition of X, and then there are other attributes that aren't definitional to X but may or may not be true in a given case. What's the problem?
I don't think there is a problem. It's just that, for the same reason, I don't think it's fair to claim that you only "have to hear about all these other features even though the lack of them, even all of them, doesn't actually change anything" because of "empty sophistry".
I say: "my technical definition of woman is [someone who calls herself a woman]", you say "but clearly Alice is a woman in everyday usage has to mean something more than that", and I say back "yeah, sure, but the other attributes don't constitute the definition". Therefore the "come on, trans women who says they are woman clearly mean something more than to tautologically say that they-identify-as-women" counterargument fails. The symmetrical counterargument could easily be levied against someone defending the "a woman is someone with XX chromosomes" definition ("clearly when you say Mrs Wiggins is a woman, you're not talking about molecular biology, therefore we see that gender-as-social-construct is a better definition") and the gender-critical could refute it exactly as I have.
With this mind, I don't see why the circularity is a problem. Why would it be? I don't think it "sounds bad", and I'm not trying to obscure it. I started out by giving just that as the definition - we only got into the weeds of the correlated attributes because of people bringing up the "but people mean more than that when they say woman" thing, it's not some deceitful rhetorical strategy I'm using to mask the circularity of the technical definition.
I wouldn't tell either of them they're full of crap, no. Again, I think self-identification can be the ultimate hard boundary while not being the only salient point. Being a woman is strongly correlated with certain features, even though the presence or absence of any one of these features isn't make-or-break. Even if there's another trait that is the ultimate yes-or-no criterion, then when I tell you "this person is a woman" I am, colloquially, communicating useful information not limited to "this person identifies as a woman".
Frankly, I don't see why this is supposed to be some great defeater to my view when people who want to focus on biological sex have the exact same (non-)problem. In a few cases, the person with a vagina and XX chromosomes will be a muscular, bearded transman. But if a gender-critical colloquially tells me, "oh, by the way, the person you're going to meet for that business lunch is a woman", they obviously mean to communicate more than "stripped naked and put under a microscope, you can tell she's a biological female". Chromosomes and/or genital phenotype are their ultimate boundary which will make them come down on one side in edge-cases, but it's not the only thing that actually matters to them when they say someone's a woman in their everyday life.
(Other comparison: even if I say "an American is, ultimately, someone who has American citizenship", I will mean something more if I tell you "Bob is American". This remains true even if, faced with two identical Hispanic guys, neither of whom are assimilated into the culture or speak great English, I say "the one who has citizenship is technically An American, the other one isn't".)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
He went back and edited it in ways which are generally agreed to weaken the piece (not that they change its core point or anything).
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I think The_Nybbler interpreted the capital letters on "Good, Actually" as sarcastic.
Why not indeed? I don't think you understood my position, which is happy with neither the mainstream trans or anti-trans positions. I'm a transhumanist, I have libertarian leanings on at least this particular issue, and I do in fact consider it a grown man's right to get an artificial tail if he wants, just as much as artificial breasts or a nose piercing. Or some sort of melanin injection that changes your skin color, if it existed. Bodily autonomy means bodily autonomy. I fully bite that bullet.
However, treating all these things as personal desires should also logically mean that we stop medicalizing them. I think it's disingenuous of the trans movement that they simultaneously go for the bodily-autonomy line, which I respect, and want to keep "gender dysphoria" classified as a mental illness. You really can't have both. Wanting-sex-reassigment-surgery should not be classified as a mental illness any more than wanting-a-tattoo-really-bad. (You could certainly find biological women with self-image issues who were suicidal before getting cosmetic plastic surgery, but that doesn't make the surgery a medical intervention then, just an expense she has decided on of her own free will in pursuit of her happiness. We shouldn't treat the matter any differently if it's a biological man who elects to get the same procedure.)
There is, of course, a separate conversation about whether someone who makes himself disabled on purpose should get the same unemployment benefits etc. as someone who lost an arm by accident. But if a millionaire wants to cripple himself at his own expense, and can demonstrate that he's making that choice of his own free will after careful consideration, rather than in a fit of psychosis - then I don't see why that should be a crime. Hella weird, but it's not my business.
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