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User ID: 2225
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25m ago
this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
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3hr ago
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3hr ago
I checked out that archival link to 4chan. I have to say, there definitely is a heavy selection effect going on there, but at least it's a different one than the the other places I've looked.
I find 4chan slang and culture to be extremely offputting, but a certain subset of the population there at least has the "brutally honest" thing going. (Or maybe they're being hyperbolic or making shit up for fun. Hard to tell sometimes...)
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5hr ago
Sure, but the "uses women's bathroom" behavior doesn't add any additional strangeness on top of the "made permanent changes to body and lifestyle" part.
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5hr ago
Maybe we're talking past each other but the thing I think is unlikely --- conditional on his making permanent changes to his body --- is that the whole thing is just acting out a fetish. Most people with fetishes don't make permanent changes to their bodies or try to constantly act on them in public, and the ones who do are generally disturbed and disregulated enough that they'll get themselves into trouble with undeniably inappropriate behavior pretty quickly.
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5hr ago
I was objecting to the implication that we're evolved to see women as morally superior, not to the corresponding claim that "protect women" is to an extent hardwired.
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6hr ago
Surely it's less strange than all the other stuff he's done to get to this point, right? Like, a random guy in drag insisting on using the women's room, that's separately a strong signal of weirdness/sketchiness. But if he's convinced himself that he's a woman at this point, and (quite possibly, though I couldn't say for sure) been on hormones and had surgeries to get there, then surely that's the strange part, not the part where he subsequently wants to use the women's restroom.
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6hr ago
The voice is, yes, usually a giveaway. But there are a lot of masculine-looking actual women out there (even some with deeper voices) due to genetics / endocrine issues, to the point where I'd be often be uncomfortable guessing --- certainly from looks alone --- whether a given person is a lucky MtF or an unlucky actual woman if encountered out of context.
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6hr ago
Have you never heard of gynecomastia? Estrogens produce breast growth in men, too, sometimes quite a bit of it. There are boys who have to get mastectomies because of endocrine issues, even! McBride seems to have been "trans" ever since his early 20s more than 10 years ago, so while that amount of growth would be unusual, it's not unheard of.
It's relevant because your point seems to be that McBride is just acting out a fetish in which he expects the whole world to be involved, as evidenced by his "wear[ing] fake breasts" (I assumed you meant prosthetics, though maybe you mean implants?), and if he's actually on hormones for 10 years, and made permanent changes to his body, I don't think that's very likely.
I don't think you need to insist that every MtF transsexual is just acting out a fetish in order to have a good argument against blanket letting any man who claims to be a woman into women's bathrooms. I actually agree with you on the conclusion! Bathrooms are vulnerable places and women are uncomfortable when men are in the bathroom with them, and that's a good enough reason to forbid it. You don't need to assume the worst about people in order to make the point.
(FWIW, on priors I wouldn't bet against McBride being AGP, but that's not always the same thing as just a fetish, and I would not expect someone who just has a crossdressing fetish to commit literally his whole life to the bit.)
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6hr ago
I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.
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7hr ago
You... may be an outlier. (Not disagreeing that it's good to keep men out of women's bathrooms, even with stalls, though.)
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7hr ago
Do you know that McBride wears fake breasts vs. being on estrogen (which produces natural breast growth; yes, even in biological males)? I couldn't discover either way from a quick search, and ... weirdly ... this seems relevant for your point.
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2d ago
Red hot CW, but it's a limited-scope question (I hope).
How can I find out the profile(s) for marginal MtF transitioners?
A few definitions:
- MtF transitioner: a male who does at least one of the following:
- Goes on HRT (cross-sex hormones) for long enough to begin to develop female sex characteristics like breast growth
- Gets surgery related to transition (including facial feminization, vocal, genital, but not including non-invasive procedures like hair removal)
- Changes name and presents full time as a woman
- In particular, I'm not counting cross-dressing, deliberate androgyny, a "second identity" as a woman, etc. unless accompanied by one or more of the above, even if the person considers himself "trans".
- Marginal meaning the usual thing, which could cash out in something like one of the following:
- Is "on the bubble" about transitioning in the above ways, narrowly doing so (or narrowly not, but that's harder to measure)
- Wouldn't have transitioned in similar circumstances, in the cultural climate of, say, 20+ years ago, (i.e. comparing to counterfactual of born 20 years earlier, making decision 20 years ago, not comparing to past self) but did transition in recent years (or is about to start transition now)
- Profile meaning:
- Demographics pre-transition, especially including age both at beginning to transition and age when first considering transition (if those are different)
- Motivation: why, in terms of consciously experienced motivation (no psychoanalysis or "no you really did it for X reason", but also not "what theory of themselves do they subscribe to"), did they choose to transition
- Religious and/or ideological background in early life (not immediately prior to transition, as I expect possible ideological shifts to bring beliefs in line with actions)
- Personality / interests
- Psychological comorbidities
I'm not asking for your personal theories (unless you uniquely have an insider or reliable source of knowledge about it); I have my own and most people's ideas about this are half-baked at best and ludicrously ideologically motivated at worst. What I want to know is where I can find one of:
- Many such people (unguardedly) talking about themselves, in places accessible on the public internet.
- High quality data gathered on this topic by people who are not just trying to grind their ideological axes / prove their pet theories.
So far I've read through a bunch of stuff on the sorts of subreddits where I'd expect to find such people, such as /r/mtf, /r/trans, /r/egg_irl. But I suspect that may not be a representative slice of the population I'm interested in.
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4d ago
Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint
As of last year, this includes the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America. I'm not sure if all the proper preparations and rite have taken place yet, but soon (if not already) she'll be considered a saint by the Orthodox Church more generally.
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1mo ago
Given the content at the links this reads like thick irony.
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2mo ago
Enjoy your updoot; this is not said enough. You know that 10% giving pledge Scott promoted? I know plenty of Christians who give 10% just to their church (and aside, as much as people like to call this "paying for services", it's really not, even when a lot of it does go to paying the pastor and maintenance -- the priest/pastor has a real role in serving the people who are not financing the operation, and most churches turn around and donate to both local poverty relief and international aid and/or missions), plus more to international charity. (Not to toot my horn but because it's the only numbers I know exactly, my wife and I give 10% of our gross to our local parish, plus about 1% to US charity and 2% to international charity, and we plan to increase the last one in the future.)
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2mo ago
I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)
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2mo ago
Maybe this is just local conditions but in my (heavily convert) Orthodox parish a supermajority of people have converted as couples or families, and I've not noticed anything like the conditions you are describing among those who are/were single. If anything it's been the single young women who have been most desperate to get married -- which they are succeeding at. (Though I wouldn't read as much into that part, the sample size is pretty small.)
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2mo ago
I agree, but I'd go one step further: the best would be to stop worrying not only about conserving vs changing things, but about what counts as "right" vs "left". Align yourself with What Is Good and work for that, regardless of whether it is present or absent in your culture, ancient or new, "left" or "right", progressive or reactionary. The moment you take your eyes off The Good and start choosing your values based on political alignments is the moment you lose your way. Politics ought to never be anything more than merely instrumental.
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2mo ago
A lot (most? all? I've not read some of the originals) of these seem to parody individual famous poems, not the poet's style in general. E.g. Blake "The Tyger", William Carlos Williams "This is just to say", Shakespeare "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", Poe "Annabel Lee", Burns "To a Mouse", Frost "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", Edward Lear "The Owl and the Pussycat", Dylan Thomas "Do not go gentle into that good night", Edna St Vincent Milay "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare", etc. etc.
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3mo ago
You got me completely hooked on Only Connect with that post, by the way. I have watched so many back episodes these last few months.
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3mo ago
I know this is probably not actionable for you at this point but this kind of stuff is yet another reason why "wait until you're married for sex" works so much better. When we got married both my wife and I were completely inexperienced (we were both virgins) and we were both terrible at sex. But because we were married and trusted each other, there was nothing hard about admitting ignorance and inexperience and hangups, and now we have had years to get good at making each other happy. I have no clue whether anything I've learned is transferable or not, but I don't have to care because I only have to please one woman, not all of them.
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3mo ago
Yeah, I don't say anything online that I wouldn't be willing to own. But I've been (slightly) concerned with two possible scenarios:
- I'm applying for a job in the future, employer searches [my other username], turns up that I've been willing to state non-current-year-PC opinions about homosexuality/trans/abortion/etc., and that acts as a marginal push away from them actually hiring me. (Argument that this shouldn't matter: I'm not likely to be desperate and if an employer can't tolerate that, then I probably don't want to work for them anyway.)
- I share something I wrote under [my other username] with some people I know in real life (mostly social conservatives), they decide to google [my other username] and find some personal or 'icky' stuff I've written about here, like about my past personal experiences with autogynephilia and related things, or my book review of Men Trapped in Men's Bodies, or something like that, and then there is social weirdness because they now think I'm a pervert or something. (Argument that this shouldn't matter: how likely are people to search like that anyway? As long as I don't literally link to my writing at TheMotte from something I post under [my other username], how likely are they to turn up the stuff here even if they do google me? And for that matter how likely is someone seeing what I've written likely to make things weird? I have no idea about any of these.)
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3mo ago
Why in particular do you think so? What are the risks that caring about personal opsec mitigates, how big are they, and how significant is the mitigation?
AIUI this is pretty much the "tucute" vs "truscum" (what is wrong with people and these juvenile names?) debate, which the "tucute" side won in the mainstream (how on earth did we get to the point that any of this is mainstream?) trans movement.
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