aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
9mo ago
These were not the tactics used in the mid 70s, this is an extremely new phenomenon.
aqouta
9mo ago
We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.
There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.
Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.
aqouta
9mo ago
They never didn't have rights. These tactics have done nothing to advance them.
aqouta
9mo ago
There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.
aqouta
9mo ago
Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.
Yes, a left handed person and right handed person cannot possible experience the other's qualia directly. But yes after trying both methods of writing they can without much consequence choose a preference. If we're bringing this back to gender than I've already conceded the ground that people can decide that they prefer to be flush with estrogen or testosterone as they see fit, I have no qualms with this so long as it brooks no costs or at least trivial costs on broader society. What I object to are the claims that this is anything but a recreation.
There is a version of liberal freedom of form that you espouse that seems something I could coexist with but it feels like two liberals in mao's China discussing whether a public option is communist just before the liberation army breaks down the door and puts a bullet in both our heads. We're barely even discussing the same subject as the trans advocates.
aqouta
9mo ago
One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.
I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."
aqouta
9mo ago
If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
aqouta
9mo ago
I'm not convinced the repeated requests for the bare link repo aren't just the same three or so people repeatedly bringing up the same request. I'm indifferent to it's return.
aqouta
9mo ago
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
aqouta
9mo ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
I'm always baffled when this accusation comes up. We understand that there are Christians among us and we don't poke that sore spot unprovoked. But it's absolutely not the case that we let reasoning from religious conviction go without critique. There are trans people here, when they argue topics that aren't about transness I don't, or at least attempt not to, let the fact that I have some disagreements on one topic come up in the other unless it's invoked.
Can you actually point to instances where someone used their belief that Jesus was the literal son of god when arguing for some policy without brooking opposition?
aqouta
9mo ago
Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.
I think it's a reasonable case of being concerned about moral hazard. If you let low quality posts because they can lead to high quality posts then you may find yourself with a flood of low quality posts so unworthy wading through that you scare away the high quality posts. There is an experiment on this, CWR.
aqouta
9mo ago
Right, it's a contest between rights and one can reasonably decide either one comes out supreme from the he context. It's an argument about trade offs. But most people aren't engaging in arguments acknowledging trade offs, they pick whichever response looks most flattering to the ingroup without any regard to reason. If the kid being made to change his appearance is a minority they will decry the act, if it's some visibly Maga kid they will support the school. This is what approximates moral reasoning for most people. It's a kind of consequentialism where the only consequences considered are PR.
aqouta
9mo ago
That very aspect is an inescapable part of being a functional agent that doesn't halt and catch fire when it encounters two mutually exclusive or conflicting Kantian imperatives, such as not lying versus letting people come to harm when an axe-murderer knocks on your door and asks where their target is hiding.
Honestly. I don't know if I agree with this. They don't catch fire but they certainly seem to get quite mad if you don't side with whichever imperative they've decided takes precedence. I got into a spat today on twitter in response to a post about a boy who reportedly had to have his ponytail cut off because of some school policy. I said if it was a public school this was definitely wrong but if it was a private school then they have the right to make whatever arbitrary dress code rules they want. A classic freedom of association vs freedom of expression problem. People didn't, an I propose in most cases like this don't, consider the trade off and say that they disagree with placing freedom of association over freedom of expression, they accused me of hating minorities and any number of other moral deficiencies. This is how normal people respond to values conflicts, pure black and white thinking.
aqouta
10mo ago
I guess it’s another victim of the toxoplasma of rage? Important issues that no one disagrees with are largely ignored, whereas less important ones will get talked about if you can create a debate over them.
Sure, but especially on a debate forum this doesn't even seem like a failure mode. If you want to say the republicans focusing on it as a point in the last mid terms lead to bad outcomes for them then I'd agree with you.
Put another way, if you come in here and claim to be able to see out of the back of your head and also think that we should focus on increasing fiber rather than decreasing sugar in American school lunches the claim that objectively impacts more people is absolutely not the claim I'm more likely to want to discuss. To many of us that claim that there is an internal feeling of gender is more like the former than the latter.
aqouta
10mo ago
Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
I tire of this style of dismissal. It's posted continuously because intelligent people disagree and the most uncomfortable feeling in the world is knowing that people you otherwise respect disagree on something that seems so obvious with no explanation you can imagine an intelligent person believing readily available. No intelligent people really disagree about the problem of obesity, there are some disagreements on what should be done about it and those are talked about consistently but they often terminate in an agreement that more information is needed or a few reasonable theories to be investigated.
aqouta
10mo ago
The point of bank/state holidays isn't that bankers get them off, it's because banks/state offices are required to be open all the other days and it's to be avoided to have 4 days in a row of banks being closed.
I found that graph very funny. "Sensuality" listed as a fetish stunned me for a second.
There is apparently a continuum of tabooness from white to Asian to black...
aqouta
10mo ago
I don't mean to claim that Musk has done literally nothing, but I remember distinctly at the time people here and in my social circles were making wild claims about how Twitter had weeks to live and I was pretty sure end users would see minimal changes.
aqouta
10mo ago
Not much has changed. I don't think I participated in that particular thread but I am quite sure my opinion would be that nothing much would change.
aqouta
11mo ago
What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
Having things is inherently and unchangeably better than not having things. This isn't a problem and there is no solution to it.
That said you seem to be heavily discounting the risk built into real estate. Everyone is a genius investor in a real estate bull market/bubble. If this was all as easy as you say then the market would correct for it.
They didn't have rights under the crown either. You were describing rights gained by tactics.
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