gemmaem
1yr ago
This is the Motte. You may have noticed that there are quite a few people around here with ideas that are deeply immoral, incompatible with liberal morality, and dangerous. Nevertheless, we have norms against being deliberately unpleasant to people on that basis.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Tactics or no, I hope people don't harass this bereaved person. I'm sure opponents of gender ideology would find plenty of ammunition anyway, from somewhere or other.
Many transgender people don't believe in the doctrine of self-identification. Quite a lot of them have strong feelings about precisely what it is that defines their own gender, and would like the rest of society to adopt their specific theory even if that means excluding people who don't fit in with that definition. Self-ID wins that internal battle because, amongst the available options, it's the one that can unite the most people within the community. Every other definition is forced to turn away potential allies by its very nature.
And yes, ultimately, self-ID is a matter of charity. I think most of the people who subscribe to it as a notion would privately concede that a person can, in theory, falsely claim to be transgender. For example, if an evil genie told me I'd have to go and tell people I was a man or they'd kill a hundred babies, and I went out and told people I was a man, that would not, in itself, make me a man. But, if people didn't know about the evil genie and thought I really meant it, then "self-ID," as a norm, says that trusting me on that would still be the right thing to do in most situations.
We might ask, what is it that distinguishes a false claim to be trans from a true one? Many activists wouldn't ask this, of course, because they'd rather not start a massive internal fight. But I suspect that the closest thing the "self-ID" camp would have to an answer to this question -- provided they felt safe enough to consider it in the first place -- would be something along the lines of, you're really transgender if (a) you want a different gender identity and (b) that want is intrinsic rather than instrumental. I'm reaching, on that second one, because I have never actually seen it articulated that way, but I think it fits. Wanting to be female because then you can get scholarships reserved for women would not make you trans; wanting to be female because there is no same-sex marriage and you want to marry a man would not make you trans; wanting to be female (or male/neither/a mixture) because you just want it is the thing that counts.
Unfortunately, "because I just want it" can be very hard to describe, let alone prove. Thus: charity.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Transgender people are not, as a rule, exempt from being "canceled" for saying the wrong thing about other trans people. (See Contrapoints' video on her own experiences of being canceled.) I would hope for some mercy in this specific instance, not because the identity questioning is justified but because she's talking about someone who quite literally just killed her dear friend; expecting her to be perfectly charitable isn't really fair. I would not, however, generalize from this case in determining leftist norms in general.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I, by contrast, often find that men who sneer at "I feel..." statements and "So what I hear you saying..." acknowledgements are often the first to appreciate genuine listening to their actual feelings, and validation of their emotions as socially understandable. Respecting other people's feelings is an important bit of social glue.
Indeed, in contexts like The Motte, thinking about people's underlying emotions rather than taking their statements solely at face value is a valuable part of my skill set. Often, acknowledging people's feelings can actually be a really useful aid to getting them to step away from their statements and examine them factually without feeling like those underlying emotions themselves are about to be crushed underfoot.
I do not doubt that emotionally respectful conversation can be done badly. I do not doubt that it can be enforced in unproductive ways. But if you think that enforcement of detached manly emotionlessness is the solution then you are very wrong.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Numerous or popular or respected would suffice. Any one of those; you don't need all three. "I saw a joke about it one time and will not be giving context or details" is not very helpful to me in understanding what you are talking about, by contrast.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Sex education has been controversial for years. Calling it "grooming" is new, and this form of demonization didn't get used before it was specifically the LGBT content that people were angry about. I think it's reasonable to suspect that this tenuous claim of sex/sexuality/gender-related education leading to pedophilia did not just happen to occur when the controversy was about LGBT topics instead of about sex education more generally.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I think you're right that a lot of this is about the emotional response. Without having seen the original conversation, I can easily believe that this is less about "I am specifically scared that there will be a mass shooting next time I am in a gay bar" and more about "I have feelings about the possibility that there are people out there who might hate me enough to kill me, in conjuction with the existence of other people who wouldn't kill me but still hate me." If you address the former in a way that invalidates the latter, then you're going to ruffle feathers.
It might help to deliberately try to phrase the calm-down in a way that actively validates the surrounding messy feelings. As in, "If you are specifically worried about being shot, then I think you can be reassured that the chances of this actually happening to you are very low. But of course I also understand that there are other reasons why you might have really strong feelings about this."
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thanks for the shout-out! The phenomenon you note is easily explained, of course. Most of the leftists on here who aren't deeply committed to charity have flamed out and left, already! Those of us who remain form a very specific subset.
I often feel an odd sense of fellow-sympathy with the honour-driven conservatives and religious traditionalists around here. It could be the shared virtue ethics, although Christian virtue ethics differs from the pseudo-Aristotelian kind in some pretty dramatic ways. But I think it's probably just that I, too, get tired of the edgy rightists and aloof centrists, and feel a certain solidarity with my ideologically-outnumbered fellows. You, too, are part of the ideological diversity of this place; every time you force the main flow of this place to deal with your more outsider-type views you're helping to establish that it's normal to encounter views on here that aren't perfectly aligned with local popular sentiment. And that means that when people encounter me they might be a little less likely to see me as an interloper to be resisted.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Is there actually a significant contingent of people who want to talk to elementary school children about anal sex? I don't know of any examples, myself. I am inclined to think that this would be very unusual.
gemmaem
2yr ago
I would think that this sort of story appropriation would be more likely to happen in a conversational format than in a formal survey, but I don't know. Are there surveys of urban legends where people tick "yes this happened to me" in appreciable numbers?
gemmaem
2yr ago
I take public transit a lot, often in New Zealand, but also a little bit back when I lived in Los Angeles. I have not been harassed as far as I can remember, although if the incident was minor then I might easily have forgotten it. There was quite a lot of street harassment in LA, and incidents from that context are thus more likely to have stuck in my memory than any small additional experiences during my less frequent public transit trips.
There are a number of possible explanations for the phenomenon that you outline. Without knowing more detail it's hard for me to guess which ones are more likely, but here are a few of them:
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Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat. And so on.
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Harassment does not occur at random. If you are, in fact, an alert traveller, and this is visible to the people around you, and you look like someone who would intervene if you saw something, then you may be carrying a little anti-harassment field around with you. Thanks, if so! But this would mean that your experience would drastically undercount the level of harassment that occurs under other conditions.
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Some of the women you are talking to may be conflating "I have heard stories of harassment on public transit" with "I have been harassed in public, although not on public transit, and do not wish to repeat the experience" and may therefore give replies like "I have experienced too much harassment to want to use public transit." This could be true, strictly speaking, even as it implies that they have been harassed on public transit when in fact they have not had that precise experience.
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People often have a tendency to retell stories with themselves in the main role, even when they heard it from someone else. Think, like, urban legends, where people will retell it and swear it happened to them because that makes for a better story. This just seems to be a thing people do. Some people may therefore be telling you stories that are not, strictly speaking, their own.
gemmaem
2yr ago
"Women secretly want to be conquered" is marginally less inflammatory than "women secretly want to be raped," but this isn't saying much. I remain unimpressed.
gemmaem
2yr ago
The shitty part would be the implication -- present here and more explicit downthread -- that women support immigration and lenient crime policies because they want to be raped. That's a shitty thing to say about people. It doubles as both an uncharitable imputation of an unsympathetic motive and as an implicit threat. It might as well be custom-designed for heat rather than light. There are good reasons to deprecate it, above and beyond other kinds of largely-unsupported speculative edgeposting.
The norms around here about not going out of your way to impute inflammatory, unsupported motives to your outgroup also apply to outgroups that it might be "acceptable to criticize" in other contexts. Just because it's acceptable in other places doesn't mean it should be acceptable here.
gemmaem
2yr ago
more Maori would far rather a stop to most immigration than a name change when speaking English
You're correct that surveys have shown that Māori are more opposed to immigration than most New Zealanders. I'd be surprised to learn of significant Māori opposition to a name change to Aotearoa, though, given that the name change is advocated in a petition from Te Pati Māori.
There's a long tradition of Māori activism in favour of using Māori place names. I see some of the greatest passion when it comes to names for mountains in particular, whether we're talking Maungawhau/Mt Eden (small hill in Auckland) or Taranaki (beautiful isolated volcanic peak, formerly also Mt Egmont, but no longer). This makes sense, given that Māori identity declarations generally start with the mountain you belong to. Contrary to what you have implied, there is often fierce opposition, among Māori activists, for using English place names when speaking English. The land is an important part of Māori culture, as are the names given to the land.
gemmaem
2yr ago
I am cautious about New Zealand's euthanasia law, and in fact voted against it in the referendum that made it law, but I do think one good measure that it instituted is that no doctor can introduce the idea, when dealing with patients. They are only allowed to discuss it if the patient chooses to bring it up.
This isn't foolproof -- an exhausted family caregiver or malicious beneficiary of the will could still bring it up with the patient and, potentially, try to coerce them into going along with it. But it does, I hope, prevent the creation of a class of doctors who routinely recommend it.
gemmaem
2yr ago
Noah Millman notably avoids this trap, writing,
There is surely still scope for both policy and cultural arguments, but the starting point for any discussion of fertility decline has to be that it is a global, cross-cultural phenomenon. The factors that correlate most-strongly with fertility decline are female literacy and urbanization. As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.
gemmaem
2yr ago
We do not! For example, Christian religious education still occurs in public schools, with an opt-out process. Officially, we have a constitutional monarchy that is still integrated with the Anglican church.
With that said, it's worth noting that the karakia that are being said before meetings are not always Christian and, in fact, need not refer to any specific God or denomination. For example, this document (Warning: PDF) on Māori Culture and Tikanga for the Workplace suggests a karakia that it translates as follows:
I summon from above, below, within, from the outside environment, to calm and settle the vital inner essence, the well-being of everyone. Be joined, together, united!
Bit of a clumsy translation, it's probably more elegant in the original language. As you can see, this is sort of vaguely spiritual without committing to any specific religion.
gemmaem
2yr ago
Being violently attacked should not be "the consequences" of making unpopular policy, or of being the family of someone who has made policies that some people do not like. If you're worried about being smeared as supporting this kind of violent attack, then don't talk as if the attack was justified.
gemmaem
2yr ago
Dina Martina seems to do a sort of housewife drag that isn't trying to be sexy. There's also a long tradition of impersonating female celebrities, some of whom dress sexily and some of whom do not. Judy Garland impersonation tends not to be overtly sexual, for example. Admittedly, this Garland impersonator says that "My wig designer and friends of mine have said I’m not a drag queen because drag tends to go over the top." There's some truth, there -- drag doesn't always have to be sexy but it's often comically exaggerated in one way or another, with sex and sexiness as frequent aspects of such comedy.
gemmaem
2yr ago
Brokeback Mountain is a tragic drama rather than a romantic comedy, so it's probably not the right movie to use as a comparison. Love, Simon is a romantic comedy, and seems to have done reasonably well. (I saw it myself, albeit not in theatres, and it was cute! I liked it). Maybe the fact that this was a gay romance wasn't actually particularly relevant to its success one way or the other.
gemmaem
2yr ago
Is there some reason why you think he's not actually squeamish? I'm not familiar with him as a writer.
gemmaem
2yr ago
I think those are basically the rules I am calling for. Admittedly, I will still complain if you say "problem of grooming" and I think you are talking about something that isn't deliberately trying to make it easier to sexually abuse children, but I would not report such comments, I'd just argue back.
gemmaem
2yr ago
I am really enjoying not knowing my own vote counts. As a rule, my comments here tend to be on negative points these days; it was not always thus but majority opinion has shifted well away from me here. I mostly shrug and accept that it will always be so, but I am glad I won't need to do that every time any more.
gemmaem
2yr ago
I really, really like "purity spiral progressives" as a substitute for "woke." I must be one of the most prominent complainers around here about "woke" as a term, but, gosh, "purity spiral progressives" is just precise. It tells me exactly what you're referring to and why you think it's bad.
It probably helps that I also agree with you that purity spirals are both common and pernicious amongst people with views similar to mine. You say "woke" and I say "Well, okay, do you mean me or not?" You say "purity spiral" and I say "Oh, yes, big problem, yup, I can follow what you're complaining about."
I am less enthused by "trans recruiters." It's better than "groomers" by a long shot, and it shares the trait of telling me what you're concerned about (namely, I assume, causing people to be transgender who otherwise would be perfectly happy as they are). It's awkward in that nobody believes themselves to be "recruiting" transgender people, so you're describing your interpretation of their behaviour in terms that imply that it is their interpretation of their behaviour when it is not. I think it ends up being keyed more closely to your specific political beliefs, as a result. I can't know who is a "trans recruiter" without knowing which behaviours you think will have the effect of creating transgender people out of people who would have been otherwise happy. There are a wide range of views on that subject, so different people are going to use the word to refer to widely different sets of people.
Still, I appreciate your efforts to find more precise terminology.
You bring up some interesting issues. I think it's worth clarifying that my use of the word "intrinsic" doesn't preclude social influence on desire. So, if someone sees a trans person, and they never had a desire to be trans before that and never would have without having seen it and known it was possible, but they do still want to change their gender now that they know that they can, just as a want-in-itself, then that would still count as an "intrinsic" desire, in the sense in which I am using the word. The cause of the intrinsic want is not relevant, provided that the desire for a particular gender is a desire for that gender rather than wanting the gender as a tool on the way to something else.
So, for example, if some of those Iranian trans women would never have wanted to be trans if they could have simply been homosexual, but, over time, they've adopted their female identity and now it feels like their own and they've come to like that identity in and of itself, then that would count as a socially-mediated intrinsic desire, by my definition. Whereas, an Iranian who is living as a trans woman but who would transition back to male in a heartbeat if they could just be homosexual does not have that intrinsic desire, and indeed I think many people who generally support self-ID as a measure would still concede that such a person is not "really trans" -- because they don't really want to be, not for itself.
If you want to be trans solely in order to make your friends accept you, then that's not an intrinsic desire for a gender. But are there really people who would transition solely for that reason? It seems far-fetched. On the other hand, people can sometimes manufacture genuine desires, in order to fit in. Kind of like the difference between wearing jeans because that is the socially acceptable costume and you don't want to be questioned, on the one hand, and wearing jeans because you have absorbed that you feel socially comfortable in them and now they just feel "comfortable" in themselves, even when no-one is watching. The former is not an intrinsic desire; the latter could be.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. If you think that transitioning will improve your mental health, but you don't actually want to be the other gender as a thing in itself ... yeah, could happen, some mental illnesses make people latch onto solutions indiscriminately.
I think some people would want to say that a person like this is still close enough to "really trans" if the transitioning does actually help. I'm not sure that I would, though. Honestly, the more I explore these edges, the more I find myself feeling like "intrinsic desire" actually does describe something important about what it means to be trans. Mind you, I am not, myself, transgender in any way, and I hesitate to present myself as an authority on a subject that hinges so closely on the personal experiences of others.
In and of itself, none of this addresses the question of whether we should attempt to reduce the prevalence of an intrinsic desire to be another gender, of course. Whether or when to police the existence of such intrinsic desire is also a separate question; proponents of self-ID would say "don't ever," but some might be willing to move to a different standard if they still believed that intrinsic desire itself would be respected under that standard.
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