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Man, there's a lot of things to touch on here! Interesting post.
First: yes, I share your concern about our economy. I look at it as a sort of "Dutch Disease," where smart people are increasingly getting pushed out of academic science (too bureaucratic and unrewarding) into finance or IT (more intellectual freedom, waaaaay more money and easier to find a permanent position). I hope the recent tech layoffs lead to some long-term restructing there, but I don't have high hopes.
In your description of this specific person, I think: "I'm shocked! Shocked!... Well not that shocked." It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF. Eg, there's a blog I read: The Digital Antiquarian And it's jarring just how frequently the early tech pioneers later transitioned. Not a majority of them of course but like... maybe 10%? Much more likely than you'd expect from random chance.
My feeling is that when highly intelligent tech nerds like the person in your story transition, it usually ends up OK. Maybe odd, but they were odd to begin with. They've got the money for proper medical care, a community of people who can accept them, and they've probably thought it through for themselves quite thoroughly.
I'm more worred about the um... less intelligent sort of nerd/geek who transitions. Like this guy: https://default.blog/p/the-year-when-my-husband-started. Seems to be much more "fetishized," less thought out, and without a community who can empathize. That guy ended up being reported to the policy by his wife.
Then there's the ultra-aggressive athlete trans people like Bruce Jenner, and the ones who go on hormones super young. Then there's FtMs which is a whole other kettle of fish. Trans is an interesting bucket of different types, and I feel like we're just starting to get enough data to identify these subtypes.
'Genius autistic MtF transitions' appears to be an exclusive phenomenon observed among residents of the digital landscape (Esports players, Programmers, Wikipedia editors).
My pet theory is that autistic geniuses blitz down to the bottom of rabbit holes faster than anyone else, and digital rabbit holes always end in Paraphilias. Furries, Wiafus and Trans MtFs are the exact same thing. It could have been something innocuous like trains, tanks or bonsai tree cutting. But on the internet, it always ends up being 'chicks with dicks'.
I'm a degenerate internet dweller, and I have navigated deep into some pretty glarly rabbit holes. Thankfully, my curiosities have been limited to geo-politics & cars. But even there, I've had to develop a strong filter to scroll-past futas, impossibly proportioned waifus, 500 year old loli vampires and furries. They are everywhere ! I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was into a hobby that WAS tangentially to any of those topics.
Now even 'normal' people have a fondness for paraphillias. S&M, Voyeurism, exhibitionism, (name you favorite porn category) are all paraphillias too. If the appeal of sexual-deviation has something to do with the taboo-ness of it, then a no-social-filter having autistic person is more likely to end up 'an expert' by getting to the bottom of it. A trans person might be into niche-and-odd sexual fetishes for the same reason that they install arch-linux and build compilers. Next, austic people are often obsessive (trans OCD seems to be pretty big area of discussion by itself), and you can see how they'd start obsessing over trans / furry / futa-dom.
To me, the final piece is community. Autistic people struggle to fit in or find their own. They find their people deep in sewers of the internet, and some of them are feeling pretty Trans. Now you have a group of people, who think like you do, feel like you do, and can explain the obsessive source of their condition in the exact words that make sense of tanother autstic person. That is a recipe for indoctrination. Now, I don't believe this is malicious or intentional. But, I do believe this phenomenon is an emergent property of 'internet sewers'.
I believe that some base population is trans.
I belive that autistic men are most pre-disposed to gender dysphoria.
I also believe that the social patterns of internet sewers lead to dysphoria, mlp-fandom & furries as a social phenomenon.
These people are the sole reason for the survival of the internet or the tech industry. I wish them a happy life. I hope they continue contributing 100x every FANG engineer.
But, I don't think we should normalize their condition among 'normies'. These people are kinda different, doing their different thing. I don't judge, but it is fine to keep it out of mainstream media.
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That doesn't follow. Highly intelligent people are also able to see gatekeepers as obstacles and can, using their intelligence, lie and manipulate to get around whatever criterion the gatekeeper is using to avoid later regret.
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Gender dysphoria is significantly higher among people on the autism spectrum. Tech work and engineering of all sorts are a natural fit for the computer-minded person with autism. Tech fields also tend to gather blue-tinged grey tribers.
Anecdotally, you’ll also find tons of people with autism who have species dysphoria (identifying as a nonhuman, aka furries and otherkin) or another dysphoria. A porcupine I know once told me she’s never surprised when someone in tech comes out as trans and a “furry lifestyler” (early 00’s term for species dysphoria).
I do wonder how many red tribers suffer silently from dysphorias because they don’t have culturally acceptable words for them. I’m a red-tinged grey triber due to my autism and family, and while they know I’m a furry, they’ll probably never understand about my species dysphoria or how it was cured in an instant in 2009.
Sorry if this is insensitive, but is species dysphoria a thing?
I don't doubt that furries are a thing, but I would have classified them as some kind of kink or cosplay or roleplay thing rather than genuine dysphoria.
I can totally get gender dysphoria, say someone with the Y chromosome feeling that they should really be in a lesbian relationship or being a caring mother or whatever. "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" (or vice versa) kinda makes sense to me.
Using s/gender/species/, species dysphoria would be "I am a felis silvestris trapped in the body of a homo sapiens", which seems incongruent to me. A nimble nocturnal hunter of rodents? That does not sound like a fulfillable aspiration this side of the singularity.
Dysphoria doesn’t care what’s fulfillable, feasible, affordable, or possible. It rejects one’s current body plan (that’s the dys) and usually says a different one would be proper.
If you were wearing an uncomfortable shirt, it would be uncomfortable whether it was a comfortable shirt worn inside out, in need of tailoring, or just badly made. The rate of suicide among dysphoria sufferers is high primarily because of the discomfort; whether or not the shirt can be reversed, there comes a point you just want to take it off.
I do have a theory as to why the anthro animal body plan is so often approximately a dog-snouted humanoid, though.
While humans domesticated dogs, dogs were domesticating humans, both species’ brain sizes shrinking as we grew to rely on each other for survival. Dogs have neural circuitry, mirror neurons, for responding to human verbal and facial cues. Dogs can’t point their fingers (instead pointing using their whole bodies), but they’ll follow a human’s pointed finger, something even the best trained cat never does.
We aren’t just Homo sapiens and Canis lupus, we’re Canis lupus familiaris and Homo sapiens canofilia. Both of our species are conditioned by evolution to enjoy looking at each others’ faces and reacting to emotions.
Here’s where the theory all comes together. As a young boy with autism, the family dogs’ faces were more comprehensible and familiar than my human family’s. I, like many people with autism, had mild prosopagnosia: I recognized human faces but couldn’t imagine them. Not so with dogs, and to an extent, any besnouted mammalian cartoon face. I could easily imagine them expressing any human emotion.
I believe autism dampens instinctual ability to understand human facial expressions of emotion, but often leaves instinctive comprehension of animal faces untouched, thus the high incidence of anthropomorphic animal appreciation among the autistic.
At that point, picking the European wildcat or a My Little Pony as one’s fursona (furry persona) instead of the golden hamster is like finding one’s favorite sushi restaurant out of all the seafood restaurants in town.
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I'd quibble with DuplexFields about how common dysphoria is among otherkin or therianthropes, barring definitions that require it, but it's definitely something that happens. Duplex compared his version to feeling like wearing a shirt inside out all the time (uh, in now-banned subreddit, sorry for not linking), and while that's an unusual explanation, it's not a particularly extreme one.
Optimistically, if you offered a whole bunch of therianthropes a magical potion, I'd hope some of them would ask for caveats about things like lifespan or opposable thumbs or social integration in their new shapes or pants (cw: no nudity, but might not be the best thing for DuplexFields to binge read), but at best at least some would quite happily jump in after that.
The lack of such a magical solution short of a singularity doesn't really change whether people can feel it: it's a sensation, not a realpolitick'ed set of political philosophy. It changes the degree you can seriously respond to it. There's some socialization stuff that could be relevant on the edges as policy questions -- some therians do feel a lot more normal with prosthesis like tails or ankle braces, which are also socially stigmatized in ways that make them highly impractical outside of Ren Faires -- but there's also reason that it isn't a philosophy with a lot of policy proposals.
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I think "species dysphoria" is associated with otherkin (1 2), who are separate from furries.
From your first link, the species an otherkin believes themselves to be “may range from mythical species like demons, dragons, elves and faeries to wild animals and domesticated pets.” In my experience, these are the ferals, would-be quadrupeds instead of bipedal anthropomorphs.
Usually it’s true, the furry fandom and fandoms of mythical humanoids don’t overlap much (though the Elder Scrolls fantasy RPGs have two furry species alongside green orcs, three races of elves, and four races of humans). The biggest thing they tend to have in common is a dislike of humans, disavowing their affiliation with this species in a frankly stunning display of the human capacity for outgrouping.
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I'll caveat that there's moderate overlap between furries and otherkin (or therianthropes, which was kinda a furry-specific variant of otherkin): furscience gives somewhere around 5-10%+ of furries identifying as therians or some related category, and while the higher estimates are usually coming from convention-specific surveys that have a pretty hefty selection bias, the lower ranges are not implausibly high.
But agreed that it's a different identifier, and I don't think there's any good numbers the other direction: there definitely are otherkin that aren't furries, and nobody knows what percentage of otherkin/therian/whatever they are.
That said, a significant number of therians didn't experience species dysphoria, or experience something that they don't categorize as dysphoria (eg, intentionally triggering phantom limbs for limbs they never had, but liking it), at least when I was able to follow the group in the 00s. Dunno what the internal frameworks are now; a lot of the matter has been driven off the open internet.
((There was historically more going on with the 00's-era 'lifestyler', both in philosophy and behavior, but the group that was distinguished by those differences is pretty much extinct today.))
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Expand on what you mean by it being "cured in an instant".
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The joke circulated among the politically incorrect is that it it's like frogs. Tech workers sense that the gender-ratio is too unbalanced and try to change sex to balance it.
@zackmdavis theorises that this is a (possibly unconscious) motivation for Scott and Eliezer's rabid defense of trans rights. The massive overrepresentation of trans women in the Rat-sphere is the only defense they can offer against accusations that the movement is a white boys' club.
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Is it even a joke though? Like... it actually seems plausible to me. Not necessarily on a biological level but like, culturally, our species just doesn't work well in groups when it's too gender imbalanced.
I mean, the shortage of trans plumbers and auto mechanics points to there being something else going on there.
They probably have more positive interactions with the fairer sex. Going back to the original story, it seems somewhat likely that Mark, while working from home, had almost no regular contact with women IRL prior to his transition.
I don't think men working on oil rigs or container ships have a ton of positive interactions with women for the weeks or months they are away from civilization, and I'm not aware of a high rate of transness in those groups.
Could be cultural though.
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In that story it sounds like working from home was used to cover up a transition that was already happening.
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I suspect that something like this is true at least via indirect pressures. Gender dysphoria is based on feeling uncomfortable in one's body, gender and identity, so anything that increases this discomfort is likely to at least increase symptoms if not the actual neurological source (though might do that too), and anything that decreases this discomfort will decrease symptoms (and possibly the source).
So I can easily see it being the case that if you regularly have positive encounters with people of the opposite sex which are founded in part on them liking you for being your sex, this might make you more confident and comfortable with yourself as you are. If such things are completely lacking, if you're just kind of the same as all the people around you but a small number of women get tons of attention and praise and special opportunities because they are women, you might start to wish you were one of them because it seems nice. If everyone around you hates straight white men, and loves women and especially trans women, then that might make you feel uncomfortable with your identity as a straight white man and wish you weren't one.
Maybe, I've never had gender dysphoria, but I used to be single and alone. And then I fell in love and my relationship with my wife is founded on me being a man and her being a woman. As a result, I'm way more confident in myself and my masculinity than I used to be. I'm not an expert, but I strongly suspect that falling in love heterosexually could cause someone wavering on the border to happily settle into their birth sex rather than becoming trans, so a lack of opportunities to do so would change the frequency of that occurring.
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Sometimes it's meant ha-ha-only-serious, but I don't think it holds up. Our species does fine in groups when gender-imbalanced; militaries have done it for millennia. Blue collar workers aren't turning trans at a high rate.
I read the first, autobiographical/Hemingway worship novel by James Clavell (Of Shogun fame), a fictionalized version of his experience in a Japanese PoW camp in Singapore during WWII, King Rat earlier this year. I highly recommend the book, but one character is pretty much this: Sean.
Sean is an RAF pilot who turns into a woman during the time in Changi. He's presented as the "Queen" of the camp, a parallel to the titular King of Camp. He is the only soldier given a private room, and private time to bathe. He's showered in attention and gifts, and in the regular theatrical performances he is the star attraction. It's implied he acts a bottom sexually, but it is never really the point: he traipses about in fine women's clothing, shaves his legs every day, showered in gifts and love and affection and service and praise for his beauty from other soldiers. He has immense privileges over every other inmate, far above his natural position in the hierarchy of the camp, second only to the King who runs the economy as a capitalist and above the commanding officers who have official power, simply as the star attraction in the theatrical productions. Far above the privileges given to the directors and producers of the shows! Clavell's self insert Marlowe knew Sean before the camp, and nearly killed him upon learning of his change in identity, but regrets it and considers it his own sin to fail to accept Sean, though he denies his own attraction to fSean. It is implied that Sean first takes on the female role because he was drafted to play a female role in a play, and that the attention lavished on him caused the change. That he couldn't turn down all the praise, and leaned more and more into the character until the mask became the face.
sounds like an interesting book! It reminds me of something I learned recently- apparently drag shows were huge during WW2, especially with the US army in the Pacific theater. See: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yN1C_bPC4tc . They weren't small or hidden, they were these huge elaborate productions with costumes, choreography, and talented singing and dancing! Eventually performed on broadway! All with dudes in drag. Who, I don't think identified as trans, but maybe a precursor to that.
Could this be something similar to how you see more male-male physical affection in Muslim countries? In that case it's just assumed that the affection is not gay (because being gay could literally result in death) so it's therefore more common and accepted.
Likewise the drag shows might be for "harmless entertainment" since nobody would think anything else could happen.
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Great comment, thank you for sharing. I’ve written before about how interesting it is that so much of what gay society (in the Anglo world, at least) was before about 1960 is seemingly completely forgotten knowledge. As much a lost society as any other, I suppose.
I bask in your praise.
I really do recommend the book. I read it with a friend from Singapore, and we both expected it to be in large part about the cruelty of the Japanese and the struggle for survival against them. Instead the cruel Japanese are largely a far-group fact about the universe, the primary struggle is within and among the PoWs. The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.
-The book started and presents as an adventure yarn, but becomes a withering critique of capitalism.
I don’t think Clavell saw it that way himself. He was a fan of Ayn Rand.
OT, not having read Les Mis: is Javert nearly as well written as Grey?
It's hard for me to interpret the brilliant scene at the end, where the parachutist liberating the camp looks at the arch-capitalist trader King, and asks why he is well dressed well fed and clean when everyone else is in rags and starved. It's the classic dorm-room smoke session idea of how if an angel or an alien came down, they wouldn't get why some people are rich and some people are poor, man, and how would you explain why one person is rich and another person is starving to them? It's heavy handed!
I don't think he comes down against Capitalism, necessarily. Marlowe, the Clavell self-insert in the best Hemingway tradition, struggles to explain why the King wasn't bad, struggles to explain his glory, after the liberation. And glorious he was! He managed to save Marlowe's arm, and maybe his life! And he could only do that because of his power, which he only had because of his hustle. And to a certain extent, Clavell also simply thinks it right and proper for a man to live by his wits at the expense of others, to risk it all and to dominate or to fail.
It's a very deep and complex critique of capitalism. In many ways, every Clavell novel kind of follows the same plot, with a young Englishman joining a foreign culture and learning its ways. Shogun does this with Japan, Whirlwind with Iran, Tai-Pan with the Hong Kong training colony. King Rat does this, but the culture that Marlowe is indoctrinated into was King Rat's American Capitalism. The King hustles around, yelling things like "Time is money!" and "There's Always an Angle!" and he has a buddy named Tex. He couldn't be more of an American stereotype if he had an Eagle and a Flag tattooed on his arm.
So it's a tough comparison because they are in very different genres, in addition to simply being very different lengths. Characters are drawn differently in punchy 300 page adventure novels that take place over maybe six months, versus 1600 page monstrosities that cover generations with massive asides about the battle of Waterloo and the French Sewers. But in my mind, I liked Javert better as a character, Grey was just a bit too much of a butt monkey for me. Javert is defined by his dedication to rules; Grey is driven primarily by his deep envy and jealousy of the King and of Marlowe.
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Debatable. Traditionally they brought along their wives/SOs as camp followers, or spent a lot of money on prostitutes. Sailors were famous for either going nuts on shore leave or turning gay, functioning through long deployments only under the harshest of discipline. And Rome was (mythically) founded by starting with a mostly male population that raided their neighbors to abduct women.
I don't know much about the lives of, say, oil roughnecks or crab fishermen, but my sense is that it's not a very healthy long-term community.
Yes. "Rum, sodomy and the lash" are the true traditions of the navy, according to a great modern figure.
If they aren't getting drunk and fucking each other, it's because they are being whipped until they stop.
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Jobs mostly aren't meant to be perpetual. Men should come home to their wives nights and weekends, and things like being a sailer are unusually stressful largely because that isn't possible.
Perhaps guys in tech/finance are working too much.
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