vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I don't necessarily agree that the intersex argument for trans acceptance is a motte and bailey, any more than the "dolphins have hairs" argument for dolphins not being fish is a motte and bailey (under a morphology-based taxonomy scheme of animals.) Trans activists who bring up intersex people are using them to point to a weakness in people's unreflective definitions of sex, and then adopting a "lumper" position that trans people should be included under their identified sex because of that ambiguity.
There's a few possible places that argument could go wrong:
- It could be the case that intersex people do not exist, or are easily and uncontroversially able to be categorized as one sex or the other. (Thus a merely two category system is tenable.)
- It could be the case that intersex people do exist, but that there are easy and uncontroversial membership tests for "man"/"male" and "woman"/"female" that can be easily used to categorize non-intersex people. (Enabling a straightforward three category system.)
- It could be that the boundaries of sex are indeed fuzzy, but that for splitter-related intuitions we don't want to include trans-women among women, and trans-men among men, even if we might allow intersex people membership in those categories. (Two categories with fuzzy, ambiguous borders.)
For my own part, I do think the existence of intersex people is a good argument for "sex" being messier than commonly believed (the same way that I think ring species and occasionally fertile hybrids point to the concept of "species" being messier than commonly believed), but I don't really use that as my argument for trans people. Instead, I have something closer to a socio-legal "adoptive sex" model, where a society can create fictive "sex" categories the same way that adoption can create fictive "parent-child" relationships. Each society or subculture gets to decide what the package of rights and privileges associated with "adoptive sex" are, and so might chose any variety of constructions surrounding bathroom inclusivity, prison inclusivity, and sports inclusivity. For my own part, I'm really only a partisan for there being some sort of protections for employment, housing and financial services, since I tend to think those are the most impactful domains, and I'm okay with less important private businesses denying services or discriminating in most other domains, since I tend to think the market will work itself out in the long run.
Whatever else you may say about capitalism, it does tend to erode discrimination under certain conditions. Black people needed a Green Book from the 1930's to the 1960's, but today every gas station wants the public's money enough that the the only color they care about is your green cash. I doubt McDonald's will ever start denying service to trans people, gay people, etc.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
A strange aspect of this phenomenon I've noticed is people somehow misremembering facts into existence that are the exact opposite of reality. I encountered this Tumblr post, where OP and several people in the notes seem to believe that Serena Williams "famously" beat a bunch of men at tennis, when the only professional match she ever played against a man she lost, and he was ranked 203rd.
It's hard to have a discussion when half of the people are wishcasting their opinions into existence. (I say this as one of the people on this forum more generally sympathetic to trans inclusion across a variety of social domains.)
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Regarding your last paragraph, I'm a fan of expanding Scott's principle of Give Up 70% of the Way Through the Hyperstitious Slur Cascade to all questions of controversial linguistic change.
For relatively uncontroversial issues, like a new technology you can "give up" and accept the new terminology at 1% adoption rate, but when it comes to considering something a slur or a faux pas, I think people waiting until 70% of people feel that way is a good rule of thumb.
If a large group of people act on this principle, it has the desired function of keeping language relatively stable.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
You didn't even link the report by Axios.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Okay, but if your position is that people in power "have ears", then I would ask what power we have to avoid them?
If it's not the Cthulhu of the masses we're trying to wrangle, then it is the power of the Cathedral or whatever right wing power brokers have going on, and we have basically no levers to pull on. There's a certain line of argument around warfare that bombing civilians doesn't make sense, because it doesn't directly hurt the military or the people in power who are isolated from the consequences. I think that cancellation works largely the same way. The vast, vast majority of people who are successfully cancelled are random people no one has ever heard of. A rich and powerful enough celebrity is relatively shielded from dire consequences, as evidenced by people like J.K. Rowling.
So if we live in a multipolar society propped up by capitalism making a small number of people almost untouchably powerful, and the powerful people are the only part of cancel culture that can be reasoned with, we're fucked. What levers do we have to affect the CEO of Cloudflare, against the heads of organizations, against private social media corporations?
I again come back to the idea that laws of some kind would be necessary to end cancel culture, and that's a massive coordination problem in its own right. Not to mention that it is unlikely to actually happen if neither side ends up taking a principled stance and supporting an end to cancel culture. A lot of the reactions here on the Motte seem to show that people would be happier with cancel culture as long as their side can get in on it too. What politician do you vote for if you want an end to cancel culture in that environment? What tangible steps can the sane people on both sides who oppose cancel culture no matter who's doing it take?
Okay, but again there's no one to appeal to? If news media turns a blind eye whenever one tribe is doing something, what power do I have to stop it, even if I dislike it? I don't have a megaphone, I don't have any power.
Again, it seems like people here on the Motte are saying, "It's about time we had the power to cancel people - it's been 10 years of one-sided cancellations, and our repeated requests for stopping have been denied!", and I'm just in the position where I feel like people are trying to control Cthulhu or something, and justifying it because of the impossible-to-control eldritch horror on the other side. Don't summon up what you can't put down and all that.
Ending cancellation is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are notoriously hard to solve. The Right now having a better ability to cancel is good for the purposes of "revenge", but I don't actually think it gets us any closer to an equilibrium where the incentive structures are set up to properly mitigate the worst aspects of human tribalism. Parts of the internet sometimes make me wonder if we don't need a Hobbesian Leviathan of some kind to force people to get along online. The more powerful the state, the stronger free speech protections can be, because the less it matters what the people actually think.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
The problem with decentralized cancellation is that no one person controls it. I've found cancellation distasteful for years, even as a relatively left-of-center person, and there's no Pope of Cancel Culture I can appeal to to make things stop. I'm not even on most social media platforms, and even when I'm on them I've cultivated a very separate little bubble, so I have literally no say in what anyone on "my side" does.
I think short of laws with teeth protecting the jobs of randos, or the big platforms adopting policies that would reduce cancellation, I can't see this changing. And unfortunately, the incentives of the attention economy mean that most big platforms like the angry froth of cancellation, and many states have at-will employment, and probably don't have much will to approach cancellation from this angle.
You say the arguments "fell on deaf ears", but who were the ears that could hear and could possibly do anything about this?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
We live in an age of active shooters and I’m not going to keep someone around who sees the solution to a difference of opinion in a gun.
Isn't the media constantly telling people that Trump is a once in a generation threat to our democracy? If one of the basic justifications for the 2nd Amendment is being able to overthrow corrupt governments, or prevent the rise of tyrants, then I fail to see how this is out of line with that basic philosophy, at least in the mind of person doing it. They wouldn't see it as a mere "difference of opinion."
Honestly, I'm someone who is able to sympathize with both the sentiment that political violence is bad and destabilizing and should generally be avoided, and the general idea that gun rights are justified as a remedy for tyranny or oppression, though preferably as a matter of last resort. To use a relatively neutral example of the second kind of violence that I find acceptable, I'd point to the 1954 United States capitol shooting by Puerto Rican nationalists. Puerto Ricans don't have representation in Congress, and can't vote for President, so I think that some of them violently attacking the politicians responsible for their undemocratic state is somewhat justified. There is at least a line of argument that it will at least possibly make Puerto Rico enough of a thorn in the politicians' sides to make them have more autonomy or better conditions, even if they remain a de facto colony of the United States.
The problem I have is that there's always going to be differences of opinion among a citizenry. I bet a lot of Puerto Ricans in 1954 thought that violence was tactically the wrong move, or fully condemned both the tactics and motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot at Congress. Who, then, gets to decide when the use of lethal force is justified to fight oppression?
I understand the basic reality that any government is going to try and shield its political class from violent retaliation. But I also think that the United States is a country founded on a violent revolution grounded in a (at the time) radical ideology, and it is hard to actually draw boundaries of when an attempted revolution or an assassination is acceptable. By definition, if you allow guns into enough peoples hands, you're effectively trusting their individual consciences and judgement to make the call for themselves, regardless of what anyone else thinks. The foundational ideology of our country is that it is worth risking ones own life for an end to tyrannical government, and we're just lucky that almost no one actually thinks this way most of the time.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Donald J. Trump is a celebrity and a politician. While I think it is ugly behavior to celebrate anyone's death or near death, I would expect anyone above a certain level of fame to have to deal with a whole spectrum of ugly behavior and have thick skin about it at this point. I don't know why people feel the need to deputize themselves to avenge Trump for this slight against him.
I also cannot emphasize enough that I haven't seen this woman's actual tweets. I don't rule out that she didn't post a bit of dark humor, which I think would be more defensible than literally and sincerely saying she wished Trump was dead.
Injustices happen every second, and the alleged injustice she suffered, is lesser than the one she wished upon a man much greater than herself.
Whatever she supposedly wished upon him, she had no power to enact it, and there is almost 0 chance that Trump saw what she wrote, or thought about it for more than a second.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Do you know something the rest of us don't about the woman LoTT got fired?
Rush Limbaugh targeting the specific individuals who were targeting him, feels like a somewhat reasonable and proportional response. What did this random Home Depot employee do to anyone? How is she the correct target? What did she actually do except say some distasteful things online?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
While big institutions occasionally get hit, cancel culture has always been mostly hitting individuals, and this lady was by no means guiltless.
What was she guilty of? Saying some mean things?
If she was announcing a serious plan to harm the president, then she should be prosecuted for her attempted murder. But if all she did was openly wish death on a political rival, then I think that shows a lack of decorum but is hardly worth her getting fired over.
I'm sure most people who see a given politician as an obstacle to their desired political outcomes have entertained the idea that the world would be better if that politician would die peacefully of natural causes, and I don't think that feeling bleeding over into violent situations is strange. I think pearl clutching and acting shocked when people darkly joke about a near miss being a hit instead is a bit silly. Is it everyone's first week on the internet or something?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
If woke cancellation tactics were already forms of disproportionate retribution against random unknown people, how is adopting the same tactic on the right going to result in a better equilibrium?
First of all, it doesn't end up hurting that many people directly, since only a small minority are going to get cancelled in the first place, and that makes it hard for people to take it seriously enough to do something about it. But second of all, I'm not actually sure there is much that can be done about it, short of passing laws that protect the jobs of randos, and making those laws have teeth. Like, plenty of my progressive friends IRL hate cancel culture and wokescolds as much as any right winger, but they don't have any power to stop the decentralized mobs calling for firings.
How does tit-for-tat even work with a large, decentralized collective anyways?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I feel like your logic is a bit twisted here. It would be one thing if the woman was part of the mob that drove that guy to suicide, but all we know about her is that she was loud about wishing Donald Trump's would-be assassin had been successful. Certainly an ugly sentiment, but completely disconnected from the behavior that drove that bar owner to suicide.
I'm actually a bit confused at you connecting these two separate things the way you did. Like, you're not sad about a random Democrat getting fired for comments she made outside of work, because some different Democrats harassed a guy until he committed suicide? How many Democrats do you think were actually involved in the decentralized harassment of that guy, or the culture of decentralized harassment in general?
According to Pew Research, 27% of US adults use Twitter/X, and 32% of Democrats report using Twitter. My guess is that only a portion of those Democrats are involved in decentralized harassment of any kind. Obviously, I would prefer if no one was involved in decentralized harassment, but it is a bit strange to turn off your empathy for people just because a small minority of Democrats do horrible shit. I bet a small minority of any group do horrible shit, and it would be terrible for everyone if we always held the larger groups they belonged to responsible for that.
I feel like this is a bad idea because LLMs appear to be a dead end beyond helping you write code.
Supposedly, it's already starting to put junior associates at some law firms out of work, and within striking distance of putting junior writers and editors, junior data scientists, and junior developers out of work. The article I linked argued that mid-May of this year was the turning point where models started to become genuinely viable for helping a senior developer with programming, with the releases of GPT 4o, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I feel like this is a little too convenient.
Centrists get crap because they are perceived as supporting the status quo. Therefore, any sins that are part of the tapestry of the status quo get imputed to centrists, because whether they say they support them or not, they are perceived as being useful idiots for whoever has the power to make the status quo a certain way, and keep it that way.
If a libertarian ardently believes that taxes are theft, then centrists support government theft. If a dominionist theocrat believes that anything but a Christian government is a subversion of God's will, then centrists subvert God's will. If a woke progressive believes that any policy that is not aiming to end racism is itself racist, then centrists are racist.
I certainly think a kind of institutionalist centrism can have the high ground compared to partisan electoral politics in many cases, but I think telling people who believe in change of some kind that you have the high ground is going to fall on deaf ears.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I actually think the Wikipedia page on women walks a fair line on the topic. The very first sentence uses "adult female human" as its core definition, and the second paragraph starts:
Typically, women are of the female sex and inherit a pair of X chromosomes, one from each parent, and fertile women are capable of pregnancy and giving birth from puberty until menopause.
I don't view the use of the word "typically" here the way you do. I think it is an appropriate amount of nuance for a reference work, since it makes room for discussion of intersex women. Now, I acknowledge that there's various decisions about how and when to include references to atypical examples in an encyclopedia, but I maintain that including mention of intersex women somewhere in the article about women is appropriate. Given the article's sections:
- Etymology
- Terminology
- Biology
- Sexuality and gender
- Health
- Femininity
- History
- Culture and gender roles
- Clothing, fashion and dress codes
- Fertility and family life
- Education
- Government and politics
- Science, literature and art
- Gender symbol
I could see the argument for keeping discussion of intersex women to the biology section, and creating a subsection for trans women under Culture and gender roles or something. But I don't really think that the Wikipedia article on the whole screams "captured by trans activists" to me.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I think it depends on if you're operating in a mostly text or a mostly in person environment.
In person, "traditional pronouns" are probably best. Over text and when people from many cultures are interacting, preferred pronouns probably work best.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Take it with a grain of salt, but the Wikipedia article for ROGD currently opens:
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a controversial, scientifically unsupported hypothesis which claims that some adolescents identify as transgender and experience gender dysphoria due to peer influence and social contagion. ROGD is not recognized as a valid mental health diagnosis by any major professional association, which discourage its use due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence for the concept, major methodological issues in existing research, and its stigmatization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Which at least seems like a decent indicator that ROGD is currently considered a fringe position, since once the dust is settled most Wikipedia articles tend towards whatever is considered "mainstream" opinion of experts over time.
Doesn't mean that ROGD isn't true, just that it is considered fringe.
Secondly, I'm pretty damn contrarian / anti-authority, and even I wouldn't say that I "don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities", rather I don't believe authority determines truth.
Right, I agree. Authoritativeness-fringeness is orthogonal to truthfulness. Fringe things sometimes turn out to be true, authoritative things sometimes turn out to be false. Continental drift was a fringe theory until it wasn't.
My larger point was more about what people tend to do when they feel like what the authorities are saying doesn't make sense, and decide to do their own independent investigation. Existing fringe theories form a Schelling point for the people rejecting authorities on a particular point, since it is often hard to build original theories and syntheses of one's own. As an example, I've always found Blanchard's typology incomplete and inadequate. It's not that I think autogynephilic and "homosexual" transsexuals don't exist, but that I'm fairly certain there are at least one or two other categories that exist as well (especially in the modern queer community.) People who believe in Blanchard's typology as a complete explanation of transness often remind me of Karl Popper's criticism of Adlerian psychoanalysis:
As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.'
I could easily replace the references to Adlerian constructs with reference to "AGP." Heck, we even have /u/KMC doing it in this very thread. I don't know how people who have never met the person under discussion, have never tried to get to know their thoughts or why they transitioned are so sure that they know the person masturbates in women's clothing. It feels like AGP-totalizers take advantage of the fact that there will usually be silence about a person's sex life due to social mores, and fill in the gap with whatever best fits their preconceptions.
I'm fairly willing to accept that some number of "trans" people are AGPs who lie to fit the most acceptable societal narrative, but I'm less willing to assume that literally every trans person who transitions later in life is one of them. Especially because, for every seeming confirmation of AGP online when people are speaking candidly, there is always a chorus of people saying, "Eh, I've considered the AGP and HSTS hypotheses, and I think I've actually transitioned for reason X", where X is something completely plausible as a component of human psychology and desire.
I feel like some of the "celebration paradox" could come down to nuance around what is considered to be a specific thing happening.
I could see something like:
- Person A: X is happening, and in my opinion X is bad.
- Person B: No, X is not happening. X', a different thing, is happening, and X' is good.
In this case, Person A may either consider X' to be basically the same thing as X, and so feel like Person B is basically saying, "X is not happening, but it totally is and that's good."
I feel like a good instance of this would be:
- Person A: I'm worried about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria creating a generation of sterilized, lifelong medical dependents in society.
- Person B: The evidence of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is fairly weak. But there has been a rise in trans people for different reasons than those proposed by the ROGD hypothesis, and that's a good thing because it means more people are living authentically and feel safe enough to be out as trans.
I think part of the perception of Person A that Person B is basically saying "ROGD isn't a thing. Also it's happening and it's good", is likely due to the fact that what Person A is saying isn't their true objection. I suspect that most people raising concerns about ROGD specifically are actually concerned more generally about the rise in trans people, and are happy to go to fringe theories to justify that concern. But if ROGD had never been conceptualized, it would have been another fringe theory, since trans skepticism has to be skeptical of the "mainstream medical opinion" of organizations like the APA.
Basically, if you don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities, you are going to rely on fringe sources. You see the same thing happening in reverse with trans activists and the Cass Review.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I feel like that's a bit presumptuous though, unless you mean it in some trivial sense like, "All communities emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex), therefore all trans people come from such communities."
I would tend to think that so-called "autogynephillic transexuality" would be a kind of transness that only requires that men and women wear different kinds of clothes and look physically different, which isn't a "hard-to-navigate social rule" in my book. Heck, even so-called "homosexual transsexuals" don't require the existence of hard-to-navigate social role for either sex, just for a "gay" person to realize on some level that they'll have more of the sexual options they prefer if they transition.
I'm inclined to give my hypothesis a label more like "pseudo-dysphoric autistic transsexuality", and would tend to consider it distinct from either of Blanchard's two categories (though I'm sure there's comorbidities.) I actually wonder if most transmen in the modern rise of transness don't belong to this category. Though I could also see an argument for something like "pseudo-dysphoric cluster B transsexuality" or a more general supercategory of "pseudo-dysphoric 'weird outcast' transsexuality" (which I suspect would often line up with neurodivergence of some kind, though it might never be diagnosed.)
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).
I wonder about this myself. I know a transman who is likely autistic, and from what I have gathered talking with him, it really seems like part of the motivation for transitioning was his difficulty fitting into the female social role as an autistic person. He was raised a conservative Christian, went to a Baptist college, and was married to an emotionally abusive man for 10 years, so I wonder if he didn't experience the female role as rather more restrictive than most women experience it?
I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day. I could easily imagine a pipeline that looks something like: born autistic in a community with strong gender norms > doesn't fit in to natal sex role due to autism > labels that difficulty "gender dysphoria" and questions if they might be the opposite sex > transitions and enough people give them a bit more leeway for them to learn the rules of their new sex role > they're much happier in their new role as a result.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
On a similar note, I have always wondered how much of the stereotype of computer programming being a common career path for trans people is because it is a lucrative profession (=able to afford treatments) where competence matters enough to make a certain amount of "weirdness" tolerable, and how much of it is because of the apparent link between autism and trans people?
It's also interesting to me how often seemingly unrelated hobbies end up converging for certain neurotypes. The first trans person I ever met was one of the organizers at my Pokemon TCG league as a kid, and now as an adult my local Magic: The Gathering shop has several trans people who show up for Commander nights, and a few of them are the ones you go to if you need a ruling on a complex rules interaction and the actual judge is busy.
Heck, some of the smartest computer scientists I know from college came out as trans at some point.
I don't think your story comes off as propaganda, /u/ffrreerree. I think your experience is the tip of the iceberg, and doesn't necessarily say anything about the validity or invalidity of trans people one way or the other.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Because I believe in federalism as a way to achieve "laboratories of democracy", I support the ability of states like Tennessee to experiment with bans of various kind, regardless of whether I think the bans line up with good policy or not.
That said, I think it's a bit Quixotic to try to prevent all bad outcomes from a system. Law is always about trade offs.
There are a lot of traffic deaths in the United States every year, but it would be insane to limit the speed limit to 10 MPH on all roads, or to spend 100% of the national budget on reducing traffic deaths as much as is theoretically possible via human engineering. Instead, we make cars as safe as we can (within reason), make traffic laws as safe as we can (within reason), and build roads as safe as we can (within reason.) And then we accept that all of those decisions mean that a certain number of people still die in traffic every year.
I'm sure there's some level of regulation on trans medicine, cosmetic surgery, and abusable pharmaceuticals that makes a set of trade offs acceptable to most voters in a given area, but I doubt it would include many provisions for dealing with doctor shopping. I think you can get most of the "benefits" of such a law, by just making it illegal in the state, and not worrying about what rich people do to subvert the law.
But what /u/Quantumfreakonomics is saying is that it is something that God says prior to the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. It's easy to write off a rule from Leviticus or Exodus, because, as you say, Jesus came to fulfill the law from a Christian perspective. But it is much harder to take a normative statement God said to Noah, the ancestor of all of modern mankind and prior to any Mosaic covenant, and say that it doesn't and shouldn't matter to modern Christians. Do you also think that Christians shouldn't be fruitful and multiply, or enjoy the beasts of the field and plants as food?
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