WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
You very clearly did mean it as an insult.
I meant it as a reasoned accusation of inconsistency in your argument - you tried to justify your rancor as based on specific "dreadful experiences" with trans activists, then failed to actually prove this claim. I take the point that your complaint is the fear of "losing access to your hobby if [you] ever inadvertently expose [your] true feelings" but that's still not an actual lived experience, just an assumption about a hypothetical scenario. I don't think your post was honest. If your genuine complaint is that you find it extremely uncomfortable existing in the vicinity of trans people, at a basic vibes level, then don't act like your actual problem is a particular subclass of "activists" behaving in specific dreadful ways! By your new, more honest claim, you'd still be extremely uncomfortable with having to share your hobbies with totally apolitical trans streamers and gamers who gave you no indication that they'd cancel you for your opinions.
(Also, I think you are wrong that trans people are "people who make everything about their sexuality". I know too many asexual trans people not to laugh that claim out of the room. I have too many relatives who I just don't buy are incestuously involving me in a kink by asking me to use their new pronouns. But I grant you that if you're talking about an instinctive "ick" you can't suppress, rather than a rational position, this doesn't necessarily make a difference - if it feels sexual to your lizard brain, it is what it is. I can sympathize: I find the sight of people with piercings very uncomfortable, no matter how many times my higher consciousness repeats to my empathy reflex that the other monkey doesn't actually have a dirty nail driven into its flesh.)
Yeah, I almost added a parenthetical about how it obviously wasn't a live concern in today's America, particularly. But I think it's one of those things where the government ought to avoid the appearance of a perverse incentive, as one of the many nested redundancies keeping us from a slide into tyranny. Caesar's wife must be above approach, etc. etc. (Indeed, this is especially persuasive to me on this issue because convicted felons represent a largely symbolic percentage of the vote in any case, so it can't do much harm to go the extra mile to prove the government's commitment to democracy.)
The apology from the organizers at that club sounds ridiculous, but it's the only anecdote you actually mention to justify your idea that "your experience with [trans activists] has been dreadful". All the rest of your post is just complaining that you meet a lot of them, and possibly that they, uh, don't tend to like it when you tell them they're "ridiculous" out of the blue?… I don't mean this as an insult, but it's hard to avoid the impression that what fundamentally feels unbearable to you is their sheer existence in your vicinity, not anything egregious that they actually do.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
it was depriving felons of their natural human rights to strip them of the right to vote while incarcerated!
This isn't really the principal argument why felons should have the vote. It's a pragmatic one about perverse incentive. If the government can deprive people of the vote by convicting them of a particular crime, oopsie, you've created an incentive for the government to drum up those exact kinds of charges against political opponents.
"Delusional" has mental-health-related connotations, and indeed, hydroacetylene explicitly inked the idea that it might be "delusional" to the claim that "transgenders have very poor mental health on average". I, on the other hand, suspect that their overblown fear of violence against them is much how any group of human beings might react under their circumstances, even if it's factually incorrect.
(To wit: I think that it short-circuits humans' evolved primate social instincts when they correctly perceive that a critical mass of other apes around them are only barely tolerating their presence and find them gross and obnoxious, even though their resulting gut feeling that they're about to get beaten up is off-target. That's civilization at work, and civilization wasn't in the training data. Argue all you want that the legal system works and most people just aren't going to jump from background antipathy to mob violence, the deep-rooted suspicion that the crowd of burly male apes giving you the stink-eye are definitely about to bash your face in is just not going to listen. I think this is a very common psychological dynamic in today's world, which lies behind a great number of persecution complexes.)
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
It may be that they die in custody without being actively executed, though I agree that there's a certain level of "herding people like cattle and torturing them to such an extent that they die in droves" that becomes indistinguishable from mass murder whether or not gas chambers and firing squads are involved.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I mean, I don't think it is delusional as such - I just think it's mistaken. But anyway, relevant to what? I think manipulating the murder statistics would be bad even if there were an actual plague of lower-scale trans violence. Indeed, it would probably be worse in that scenario, because recklessly doing evil in the name of a good cause oftentimes has worse long-term consequences than recklessly doing evil while tilting at windmills.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
"Disingenuous" is being kind. See this example (…)
What I was describing as disingenuous was the rhetorical move where they go "a trans genocide is happening; for proof, see these examples of hate crimes against trans people". This is a classic motte-and-bailey maneuver, intended to blur the line between genocide qua mass murder, and genocide qua cultural erasure. I think "disingenuous" would be the right word even if the hate crimes being pointed at were solid cases; the validity of the anecdata wasn't what I was addressing one way or the other in that paragraph. (I agree that "disingenuous" would be an understatement for some of this stuff, but I think it's the right word for this kind of motte-and-bailey vagueness around different definitions of very loaded words like "genocide".)
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
You say "but", but I didn't intend my comment to take a position one way or the other on whether the feeling of intimidation is justified - merely to put forward an explanation for why they feel compelled to engage in these statistical misrepresentations, other than cackling machiavellianism.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Well, that's one thing. What I'm saying is that there's no consensus on equating personal detransition with questioning the overall construct. There are trans spaces where even "I thought that I was trans but I'm not" is viewed with suspicion, but equally, there are many where it's viewed as a perfectly valid thing to say, so long as it doesn't entail doubting other people.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
yet by the standards of the leftist community, bringing up desistance or detransition is itself transphobic
Not all of us. The sentiment is sadly common, but I wouldn't call it a consensus, there's very much an alternative, more positive viewpoint floating around - e.g. the whole "Cis+" concept.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Well, I don't think mainstream Blues in America have "we should make all Christians renounce the faith and ban indoctrinating children into Christianity" as an explicit or even implicit goal in the way that a lot of mainstream Reds would proudly endorse "we should make all transgenders detransition and ban indoctrinating children into questioning their gender" as reflective of their agenda and beliefs. And as I said, I think that such large-scale policies are much better grounding for a cultural-genocide claims that acts of individual violence - i.e. whatever degree of validity the "trans genocide" case enjoys, it rests on the existence of political will towards dissolving trans identity, not on anecdotal claims of thugs beating people up.
But certainly, to the extent that policies intended to erase Christians as a cultural identity exist, there is a valid case that they would fit the bill of "cultural genocide" as leftist theory defines it. For example, I think that to the extent that the application of "genocide" to crimes that aren't literal mass murder is ever reasonable, it's reasonable to call Muslim jihadis genocidal even if they ideally want to forcibly convert all infidels rather than slaughter them.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
My understanding is that defendants have tried to use it, although it's not actually been used to successfully get away with murder in the way activists have tried to claim. If there were actually idiots with one Jewish great-great-grandmother who tried to get off on a religious-freedom technicality by repeating the blood libel, I think most actual Jews would be in favor of banning that line of argument, whether or not any judges had ever bought it. I agree things would be different if the defense only existed as a paranoid trans fantasy, but that doesn't seem to be true.
Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious".
Better to say, I think, that the trans genocide is a motte-and-bailey. What queer theorists mean when they discuss "trans genocide" among themselves is rarely anything to do with the murder rate - the actual analogy is to residential schools, not Auschwitz; cultural genocide, forced assimilation and reeducation, an attempt to stamp out trans as an identity. I think it's hard to argue that this isn't happening, given that a majority of conservatives on and off this forum would openly advocate for it. There's just a root disagreement about whether it's actually a bad thing or not.
(There's also a terminological dispute about whether it's ever appropriate to use "genocide" to talk about processes that don't involve literal mass murder, or if that's always, inherently, motte-and-bailey. I can see both sides of that argument, but I don't think we should over-focus on it in the trans case, because advocates of the "trans genocide" terminology are ultimately just drawing on what is, as per the Wikipedia link, a widespread use of the term in their intellectual milieu. They're doing a separate disingenuous thing when they try to bring up the sloppy statistics to justify the trans-genocide thing, deliberately blurring the line between genocide-as-murder and genocide-as-assimilation more than they need to.)
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Do you mean that the relevant states banned a defense that no one had actually used? Or a defense that had never been successful? If the latter, I still think it makes sense to ban it even if it hadn't historically bought its claimants as much leniency as the activists claim. More sense, even. No more time should be wasted on a legal strategy that rests on mistaken assumptions and doesn't even work. (See also "the Devil made me do it".)
As ever, misleading hyperbole is a tempting Faustian bargain when you're dealing with a problem that is widespread but not intense enough to spark much outrage if you stick to the facts. The same thing happened with rape-culture discourse - the real problem that made activists' blood boil was the staggering number of women who get socially pressured into sex they didn't really want, but calling that out for what it is is difficult without sounding either mealy-mouthed and unconvincing, or hysterical and overreacting. So they gesture at an epidemic of violent rape that just didn't exist to the degree they needed to, in an attempt to reconcile public feeling to how unbearable things felt to them.
I think this is exactly the devil's bargain trans activism has struck with these laughable statistical manipulations - trans people feel unsafe in a generalized, exhausting way, but by any rational accounting, outside of specific circumstances like sex work or prison, most of what they're feeling is inchoate intimidation, not an ongoing bloodbath. So people don't care and they feel they "have" to doll up the story in lurid claims about murder rates to get their emotional pain taken seriously. If it bleeds, it leads.
Unrelated:
Various US states have passed laws banning defendants from using the "trans panic" defense (i.e. the defendant was so shocked upon discovering that an object of their sexual desire was transgender that they lost control of their faculties) in murder trials, under the historically dubious claim that this defense has resulted in vastly reduced sentences or even outright acquittals.
I am a little confused as to how this fits into your argument. Surely this is a sound legal decision in the world where transphobic hate crimes aren't meaningfully a thing (so murderers shouldn't get to appeal to a supposed widespread, sympathetic understanding of "who among us would not feel compelled to strangle a tranny if we saw one up close?", because it's not true), just as it is in the world where transphobic hate crimes are widespread (and are thus a plague that needs to be stymyed by throwing the book at bigots).
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
Granted, and I think many more still might just make a doomed attempt to make everyone get along, one big family Thanksgiving dinner that never ends. My point is just that a liberal woman having a rule against dating conservative men isn't necessarily purely about personal preferences/purity standards; it can be a practical matter on a level with "I have three cats, swipe left if you're allergic".
WandererintheWilderness
16d ago
I think this depends on the woman's social circle and what kind of behavior "conservative opinions" entail. If you have enough queer friends then you just can't be in a long-lasting relationship with someone with anti-LGBT views, for example - something's got to give.
WandererintheWilderness
18d ago
While I can sympathize with the plight of men who want children more than they want romance, I object in the strongest possible terms to a dichotomy that writes off love as a Disneyan fantasy and otherwise irrelevant. It is in fact perfectly reasonable to want one's romantic partner in one's life primarily because one is deeply in love with them. Being deeply in love with someone is indeed fun and wonderful - for men and women alike. And if what you're looking for is such a relationship, rather than a transactional arrangement geared towards child-rearing, then it is perfectly reasonable to reject a partner who is offering the latter and uninterested in the former. This isn't a gendered thing - it's the same reason men are afraid of their wives turning out to be gold-diggers. They don't regard themselves as buying sex and kids for a fair price (in which scenario "wife" and "gold-digger" would be synonymous), they want to be married to someone who loves them.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
Having good intentions and believing their policies are especially good are not necessarily the same thing. They may believe, for example, that they're doing good simply by holding a given office, taking up space that could have gone to that bastard who ran against them.
WandererintheWilderness
22d ago
Not me I would think, except insofar as some would object to me being here at all. But abstracting that fact away, I don't think so.
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
I'm not claiming that dancing doesn't or shouldn't act as a mating ritual. I'm saying that dancing is supposed to be fun in and of itself, to the extent that some people do it for its own sake - not a chore you need to slog through to get to the good bit. (Compare: sex, procreation.)
WandererintheWilderness
24d ago
You cannot do these things and not have relationships with men at all.
Sure you can. The obvious zinger is that you can have relationships with women instead (though as mentioned elsewhere in the thread this is, of course, no guarantee of an abuse-free relationship). But also, you can dress skimpily and go clubbing for you own enjoyment with no intention of pursuing sexual or romantic relationships of any kind. For one thing, there are certainly people who enjoy dancing and getting hammered in a crowd - going to the club is, in fact, meant to be an enjoyable experience in itself, not some cumbersome prerequisite protocol for finding a mate.
(As for the skimpy clothing, setting aside the possibility that they just feel more comfortable with more skin showing - and we cannot underestimate that; naturist camps are attractive to non-swingers! - there are also people who enjoy feeling like a center of attention in a crowd, but don't particularly want that diffuse attention to translate into one-on-one flirtation.)
Naturally doing all those things increases one's odds of being sexually assaulted by strangers. But Peglow's whole point was that this effect is less than you'd think, and the bigger abuse risks are in established relationships. So the takeaway can actually be "what you've been told is backwards: you're more likely to be abused if you go steady with a boy than if you party without settling down". It's a bold point but a perfectly coherent one, and it's certainly not isomorphic to conservative sexual mores.
WandererintheWilderness
26d ago
Mind you, what a politician risks when taking a bribe is a tiresome lawsuit and some PR damage. What an informant risks when leaking an extremist militia's secrets is a bullet to the brain. In theory, it makes sense that the latter would demand greater hazard pay.
Not in SnapDragon's original post - but SnapDragon's original post began with a claim that "[his] experience with them has been dreadful". And then most of the post amounted to listing all the spaces in which he encounters a high percentage of trans people, without actual elaboration on what made his personal experience with them "dreadful". This naturally led me to suspect that it was the sheer experience of interacting with them which he deemed "dreadful", rather than any particular objectionable behavior on their part - making the framing of the argument as "I'm only so worked up about trans people because they've been awful to me" deceitful.
I'm not saying that the worry over hypothetical scenarios where SnapDragon is ostracized for gender-critical views is paranoid or irrational. But I don't think it's honest to start with "my experiences with trans activists have been dreadful", and, when pressed, admit that in fact nothing dreadful has happened to you, you're just constantly afraid that it might. Imagine a black activist saying he's only anti-white because of his personal "dreadful experiences" with white people, but, when questioned, he admits that he just means the stress of interacting with random white people with a constant background fear that they're violent racists who'll beat him up if he ever accidentally does something to offend them. I think this would be disingenuous even if we imagine our activist living in a genuinely very racist town, where that fear isn't actually irrational. He hasn't had that experience. He just hasn't.
Moreover, I took SnapDragon's reply as agreeing that he ultimately felt an "ick" about interacting with trans people ("I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality", where, FWIW, I glossed him as equating being trans with making everything about your sexuality, not just saying that a lot of trans people happen to be over-sexed). I'm not accusing all transphobes/GCs of only being motivated by such an ick; but SnapDragon's first post gave the impression that he, in particular, was, and his second post seemed to confirm it explicitly.
Hence:
I believe you, but this is a completely different claim from the claim that being trans is inherently a sex thing and therefore discomfort with being surrounded by trans people is justifiable as discomfort with people being off-puttingly sexual in your personal space without your consent - which is what I took SnapDragon to be saying.
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