WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
your claim that rape-by-deception trans people are "creatures of fantasy" i.e. that nothing like this ever happens
I never said that; I said it was "largely a creature of fantasy", i.e. it might happen very occasionally but in statistically insignificant numbers.
WandererintheWilderness
3hr ago
There have been a surprisingly large number of "creatures of fantasy" convicted and imprisoned for rape by deception.
A, Chinese robbers. B, neither of the two articles you link really pattern-matched to the "trap" archetype. Watkin was a social transitioner who frankly looks so clocky that I'm very much inclined to believe her defense that it didn't cross her mind that the guy might not have realized. Which is maybe not best practice, but we're a long way away from the sultry queen who suddenly whips out a penis. As for Newland, I honestly can't tell if she even identifies as male? It sounds like this could genuinely just be a lesbian who engaged in an improbable deception to get in a straight woman's pants. The article never claims that she identified as trans, it merely draws a possible legal analogy from how her case was judged to how this may reflect on trans cases. And either way, we're dealing here with someone who went by a wholly fake name and invented a fake backstory about an accident; the deceit goes well beyond a lack of disclosure even if Newland was indeed a trans man.
I feel absolutely confident that all my trans friends' judgement on these cases would be, respectively, "Watkin was not actually trying to deceive anyone", and "Newland was obviously trying to deceive the victim and the way she did so would constitute rape-by-deception regardless of the genders angle".
In situations where names do imply something factual,
But trans activists' whole thing is to alter cultural and linguistic norms so that "she/her" or "woman" no longer imply anything factual about people's reproductive organs. We want a world where everyone knows that some "women" have penises rather than vaginas. There is no deceptive intent, as there would be in the Michael Jordan example. Moreover, until the linguistic expectation that a "man" necessarily has a penis becomes as universally quaint as using "gay" to mean happy, which I grant might take some decades yet to filter through from the wokest Blue hubs, I am generally in favour of trans people actively making their transness transparent in any context to which sex is relevant. And frankly, so many trans people are (physically or digitally) bedecked in pins and pride flags that we're a solid chunk of the way there already.
please just lay out your argument for why trans people should be treated by society as their preferred gender without reference to your name analogy.
Well, my main reason isn't so much a positive argument as the root preference-utilitarian claim that it is generally morally good to treat people the way they wish to be treated, and that any exceptions to this require a proactive case for why normal rules of courtesy should be suspended. Going along with trans people's preferences constitutes being nice to them; misgendering them constitutes being mean to them. I believe in being nice to people unless there are overwhelming reasons not to, and I've never seen a conservative make a convincing case as to why trans people, as a bloc, should constitute such an exception. (They occasionally make cogent utilitarian arguments about specific situations; I can respect the opposition's view re: the convicted-rapist problem, for example. But that would only justify making exceptions to the general refer-to-trans-people-as-their-preferred-gender rule in those highly specific contexts; it is not an argument for ignoring them all the time.)
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
Well, I don't think it's fair to say I "decline" to describe the "various exceptions" when I outlined a few examples of what that might look like. I do decline to attempt to enumerate them exhaustively, because I think they look more like a literally infinite number of possible context-specific scenarios than like a list of simple rules.
And I'm a little uncomfortable with the "therefore" which gives the whole the appearance of some sort of logical deduction. I brought up the way we treat non-gender-related chosen names as an analogy for how I think we should think of trans people's chosen genders. I do not claim that you can rigorously derive trans rights from the practice of chosen names on its own; it's merely a good reference point for how I, as a pro-trans person, think of the former, which is what the OP was attempting to grok.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
(…) implicitly concede that there may be circumstances under which it's okay (or even preferable) to NOT indulge a trans person's desires in terms of name, pronouns etc.
I don't believe there are any such circumstances, unless you contrive a situation where their "desire in terms of name, pronouns, etc." is unrelated to their actual transness (e.g. a trans man happens to currently be impersonating a specific biological man for nefarious purposes).
Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?
A variety of unrelated ones, much as there's a variety of unrelated reasons why you wouldn't feed the apparent starving beggar.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
No there wasn't. There really wasn't. You made an unqualified statement, which you now (apparently) concede to be incorrect.
I'm sorry, but I think this all kinds of an isolated demand for rigor and that no one reading my post in good faith would come away with the impression that I have some sort of reverse-Kantian objection to identifying a murderer in hiding. If I said "If a man knocks at your door, explains he's starving, and asks for a crust of bread, it's clearly the correct thing to do to feed him", and I later clarified that obviously this statement takes all kinds of common-sense assumptions for granted (eg: "you" have some food to spare; "the man" is a stranger to you rather than a wealthy personal enemy of yours trying to discredit you with a hidden camera; etc.), only a pedantic logician would call that disingenuous.
Well, there was, of course, an implicit "all else being equal" in the sentence you quoted. In your thought experiments as stated, all else is not equal; but that doesn't impinge upon my point, which was that insisting on calling Tex "William" isn't necessarily the right thing just because it is, in a technical sense, "the truth". There can be other, context-specific reasons why it might be good to identify a person currently calling himself Tex as his legal name of "William" against his will - if he's a wanted murderer hiding under an alias, for example. Your Michael Jordan impersonator largely falls into that category. (And mind you, it could be the case that a tall black guy's legal name happens to be Michael Jordan (e.g.), and suddenly the ethical thing would be to only refer to him by a nickname where it might cause undue confusion! The underlying "truth" is besides the point!)
I don't think trans people are in this category in the vast majority of cases. The most crucial difference is that it is legitimate for a hotel to treat the real Michael Jordan differently than they would a random lookalike, whereas if people treat a random person differently depending on whether they believe that person to be a man or a woman, that's their problem for being sexist. Moreover, most trans people are not trying to pass themselves off as the real Michael Jordan. The typical trans woman puts a trans flag in her Bluesky bio and will start talking about her transition journey as light conversation - she will certainly mention it before a date gets to second base. The "trap" who passes perfectly and uses that to lead on a potential sex partner all the way to the bedroom is largely a creature of fantasy, and not behavior mainstream modern-day trans people would endorse (if only because it doesn't tend to go well for the trans woman herself).
Similarly, in your King Charles example, there is more at stake than politeness and self-identification. If Charles Johnson is suffering from a delusion that he is the King Charles then perhaps I shouldn't go along with that (unless medical professionals recommend going along with the delusion for the patient's wellbeing, which does happen with e.g. dementia patients, but that's another question). Nor would I go along with it if a trans woman started telling me about her uterus or a childhood memory of her first period. But normal trans people are not like this. They know they are biologically of the opposite sex; in fact they often advertise it. If my friend is an eccentric who knows perfectly well that he's not really a Windsor, but would like me to call him "your majesty" as a kind of 24/7 LARP (perhaps he's into micronations?), I'd happily roll with it - and if for some reason I refused, it would be absolutely fair of Charles to not want to be my friend anymore.
(This doesn't change if my friend has maverick philosophical opinions that lead him to defend the position that at the end of the day, the "king" of a micronation and the "king" of a real recognized countries are more alike than they are different, in the way that a trans woman might know perfectly well that she's not the kind of woman who has a uterus and a vagina, and simply defend the esoteric metaphysical point that she's still as entitled to the word "woman" as anybody else.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Yes. I don't think it's as dickish as deadnaming a trans person unless he's actively stated hearing his legal name spoken is painful to him - and conceivably he might be enough of a menace that being dickish to him is a defensible strategy in any case - but all else being equal, it's clearly not a nice thing to do, and the people who do it know that it's not a nice thing to do. A lot of anti-Ratsphere leftists make it a point to call Scott Alexander "Scott Siskind" and I think that's dumb and rude of them, too.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
More pointedly, I think the image of "trying Papa's things and Mama's things and then realizing that the Little One's things are just right" is supposed to lead children away from messing around with their parents' things when they're home alone. Which is less of a moral lesson and more of a practical, avoiding-accidents-in-the-home sort of lesson. The story doesn't actually illustrate that lesson, so much as wrap the image in a fun little story that'll stick in kids' minds.
Speaking as a very pro-trans person: I don't especially believe that "gender" "exists" in some objective sense separate from subjective preferences - nor that it needs to.
I think it might help you understand my perspective if we look at another marker of identity with huge emotional significance to individuals, but very little biological basis if any: names. If an individual whose legal name is William would prefer to be known as Bill or Tex or Archimedes, it's clearly the correct thing to do to call him by his chosen name. In some technical contexts it might be necessary to bear in mind that the name on his ID papers is "William", but it would be dickish and bizarre to chime in whenever he says "Hi, my name's Tex" and go "ackshually, your name is William; either you're lying or you're delusional". If one of Tex's coworkers keeps passive-aggressively calling Tex "William" no matter how many times he explains that he doesn't like hearing that stuffy-sounding name that doesn't feel like it reflects him as a person, that coworker would clearly be engaged in a kind of low-grade psychological harassment.
Social transition, to my way of thinking, works very much like this, except in addition to a "William" who would rather be an "Alice", it's a "Mr" who would prefer to be called a "Miss", a "he" who would prefer to be called a "she". It is clearly, I feel, the nice, the civil, the moral thing to do to respect that person's wishes; and it doesn't require anyone to be confused about what William/Alice has got in his/her pants. She can be a conversational "she" and a medical "he" in the same way that the first guy was a conversational "Bill" but a legal "William". It's just that, unless you're a doctor/an IRS employee, the underlying technicalities of Tex or Alice's identities are none of your business. If a guy tells you "I'm Tex" it's none of your fucking business whether it says "Tex" or "William" on his driving license, outside a few specific technical circumstances; likewise if someone tells you "I'm a woman" then it shouldn't be any concern of yours what she looks like naked, unless you happen to be a doctor, or a prospective date. To put it another way, under normal circumstances, the only relevance that the sex of a random person has to you, whatsoever, is by what titles and pronouns it would be polite to address that person; how you should refer to them if you don't want them to feel insulted or misrepresented. So if that person dislikes the pronouns and titles that their biological sex would normally entail, sex loses relevance altogether, trumped by self-identification.
And a similar analogy can be devised for medical transition. Let's say you like to shave your chin but keep a mustache. Is there some specific factor in your brain that makes you a Person Whose Inner Identity Is A Mustache Guy? Probably not. It's besides the point. It would still be dickish of someone to say "biology says the male Homo sapiens is meant to have hair all over his face, you're not allowed to shave your chin", or indeed "it's better for society if grooming norms are cohesive, shave that mustache as well or you're a hippie freak". How you want to style your facial hair-growths is your business; if it's emotionally important to you to present the face of a Mustache Guy to society, and you don't feel like yourself with a lumberjack beard or a full shave, then it would be dictatorial of society to force you to do otherwise; it would be rude and invasive of any private third party to tell you how they think you ought to be styling your body.
"Gender identity" is just a kludgy concept lumping together a lot of disparate preferences, positive and negative; and even when two trans people share a preference, they might have come to it for completely different reasons (much as you may like to shave your beard because you think a full beard makes you look like some kind of caveman, while I like to shave my beard because I don't like how sweaty and itchy it makes my neck). But all those preferences, individually, should be valid in any free, humane society.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Even taking this as read, you might still expect male-to-female trans lesbians who like themselves a sexy video game protagonist, no? I had been reliably informed there were a lot of those in the gaming world.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Are there no progressive sex-positives getting involved?
Well, at least you're acknowledging that a new religious movement is what trans is.
Not exactly, but I do concede that it's a belief system - and as a liberal atheist I believe belief systems should get the same kinds of legal protection whether or not they're grounded in supernatural beliefs, as historical belief systems tended to be. Persecuting Daoists or Buddhists for their beliefs continues to be wrong even if we're simply talking about their moral or philosophical beliefs rather than anything properly theological. I feel the same logic should apply to Transgenderism - and Vegetarianism, and Effective Altruism, etc.
(…) then in my eyes this strengthens rather than weakens the case for banning these interventions for children.
I wholeheartedly agree - about FGM, male circumcision, and medical transition for children. Physical alterations to children has always been the one point where I diverge from the progressive consensus re: trans issues, though it puts me into quite a lonely place politically - my belief is that in an ideal world, children should be allowed to socially transition, but barred from making permanent changes to their bodies just yet, and this is something both sides view as unacceptable from opposite directions.
(Now, mind, I do think that there's something of the isolated demand for rigor to the scrutiny applied to transitioning children. There are a lot of other alterations to children's bodies that are currently kosher, from getting a girl's ears pierced to so-called-"corrective" genital surgery on intersex infants. I tend not to find that much common ground with a lot of anti-child-transition campaigners due to them not caring about those things, never mind their views on adult transition, which are rarely congruent with mine. But I'm leaving this as a parenthetical here, insofar as given your stated position on circumcision I think you might actually be ideologically consistent on this kind of stuff.)
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
There should really a better way to encapsulate the specific idea "people are trying to make there not be any Xs anymore" as distinct from just "people are systematically mistreating Xs"; many groups are persecuted without their enemies' aim being to extinguish the relevant identity altogether. Trivially, that UN definition you quote conceives of itself as applying to gender-based "persecution", and it would be… surprising for any government to set itself the goal of actually erasing women from the Earth (even in the non-murder-based sense of trying to forcibly transition all women into trans men), so they can't intend that "persecute" should be understood as implying an intent to destroy.
I dislike the "trans genocide" terminology, but I'm kind of stuck on a better word that doesn't minimize the concerns. Attempts to extinguish belief systems by any means necessary up to and including forced conversion and outlawing specific rites are a well-attested historical phenomenon which seems like it'd make a better analogy, but I don't believe that idea has a more specific name than the somewhat broader umbrella of "religious persecution".
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
A good half of these do seem to be talking about "socially constructed" constraints, which does lead me back to wondering how much the possibility of transitioning has taken the wind out of the sails of any push to relax or change the gender-role expectations of women
It's a common complaint and one I take seriously, but at the risk of sounding like the "we need more Stalins" guy, that failure mode seems to be the province of moderate trans activists, of normie Blues who sort of support the general idea of transition and mouth the right slogans, but are probably a couple of decades behind on the philosophy. In online spaces that skew younger and leftier, your Tumblrs and Blueskies, people love nothing more than to validate trans women's right to be masculine or trans men's right to be feminine. Real trans activists love themselves a MTF butch lesbian who rounds back to using he/him pronouns with three nested layers of irony, and accordingly, would strongly oppose the idea that a girl not conforming with gender norms must mean that she's secretly a trans boy.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
He did not claim that there was no LGBT community that observed it; he claimed that he had never personally encountered a LGBT community that does. If I want to prove that leopards are not commonly kept as pets in America, that leopard-keeping is a fringe practice, I can say "I've never seen any American with a pet leopard". I'm sure if I Googled it I could find counterexamples, but that would be besides the point, which would be to use "have I organically encountered X in my day-to-day life" as a Bayesian proxy for "how common is X".
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
What does it preach? The worship of wealth and **sensory pleasures The flaunting of jewelry and clothes, insufferable bragging, and **the pathetic ridicule of the weak.
"I hate sexual hedonism and violent alphas punching down on the weak. This is why I'm going to start an armed anti-feminist revolution to guarantee every man's right to fuck, and if the hoes don't like it, tough."
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
I don't understand why you're now on round two of using any possible ambiguity in a statement to imagine a needlessly weaksauce implementation. The legislation could look like anything up to and including automatically granting American citizenship to any Israeli who asks for it, or indeed just granting all living Israelis American citizenship upfront. Is this likely to happen? No, but dr_analog was not trying to predict the future: the original post was simply "We should…".
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Personally, I have very little sympathy for the objective of keeping Iran away from nukes. "A Middle-Eastern country run by bloodthirsty, slightly genocidal religious nutjobs has nukes" is something we have survived before
Well, you can survive a decent number of rounds of Russian roulette, too. Which isn't to say I'm an Iran hawk, but "very little sympathy" seems extreme.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
If they would still be subject to U. S. immigration law
By "We should encourage" I assume dr_analog meant passing legislation that would explicitly make immigration from Israel easier, not just sending them postcards with a suggestion.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
nor is the situation in Lebanon a genocide
It isn't actually, but if we took "all of Lebanon must burn" at "face value", it plainly would be. It's concerning, and in the modern world, unusual, for war rhetoric to aspire to the literal obliteration of the enemy nation - I think it's fair to describe such claims as genocidal aspirations even if the actual war strategy is less insane. (And yes, Hezbollah and Hamas plainly harbor genocidal aspirations with regards to Israel.)
WandererintheWilderness
12d ago
The part where he insists on wearing a fucking fedora to every interview, however, is pure contrarianism. That's not the sort of thing rational!Draco or rational!Quirrell would do.
I suspect his gambit may be "I know my limitations: I am incapable of seeming cool and normal. Better to deliberately play an Eccentric Character of my own choosing, than try to impersonate a conventionally charismatic, professional normie, and fall into the uncanny valley". The sheer stubbornness in the face of ridicule is still baffling, but at a guess, I think that's the 5D chess he thinks he's doing, anyway.
The UK already had hard-won religious freedom; it just didn't have meaningful representation of a religion whose commandments conflicted with a weapons ban, so the issue hadn't come up. It might very well have come up even with zero immigration, if a lot of white Englishmen had started converting to Sikhism out of some trend, in the same way that so many British hippies got into Buddhism.
And I guess I just don't see that big of a conflict there… I think "virtue" is a weird way to describe the weapons ban. I don't believe Brits think it's deontologically wrong or taboo to carry knives; I think they've adopted weapons bans as a technocratic, utilitarian policy. Whether religious freedom is to be thought of as a deontological line-in-the-sand or consequentialist utilmaxxing is perhaps more debatable, but in either case, this makes it sensible to trade one against the other depending on circumstances. Something like: "I believe that in a vacuum, it is good to minimize the amount of citizens permitted to carry knives, as doing so will reduce violent crime and I do not believe that people have an innate right to bear arms. However, I also believe that the state should rarely if ever ban religious practices. Therefore, the best way to maximize utility while respecting the constraints of respecting religious freedom is a weapons for ban for everyone except people whose religion mandates that they carry a ritual knife on their person at all times" is in no way incoherent or self-contradictory.
(Again, it seems isomorphic to other kinds of religious exemptions, i.e. "I do not believe that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of school whenever they like; but I believe it's important for the state to respect religious practices; therefore parents are allowed to let their kids skip school on their faith's recognized holy days, but not for any other reason". I don't think there's a "virtue" of respecting religious freedom, and a "virtue" of mandatory education, that are in conflict here in any problematic way, it's a very common-sensical status quo to end up with.)
My mistake on skimming and missing that bit. (Though I'm wondering about the impersonal "the court heard". From who? Does Watkin deny saying it?)
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