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Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
Maybe they collapse the distinction because they have to.
First of all : the point that surgery being the barrier excludes most transpeople is true.
Second: if we go with the "'gender dysphoria" theory of transness as opposed to the "gendered soul" theory of transness this creates real awkwardness. Trans will forever be tied to a medical condition which means it will always be subject to the charge of being a medical disorder.
After all: what is a "gender identity"? Why is this being projected on everyone as opposed to the mentally ill (what else would you call wanting to mutilate your body as your greatest hope of relief)? After all: we do not project a "skinny identity" on everyone and say that anorexics are the ones whose body doesn't their skinny identity or a "cripple identity" and say that people with alien limb syndrome simply have a mismatched identity with their healthy body so let's cut off their hand.
If dysphoria is our marker then we're talking about people with a legitimate psychological condition combined with a propensity for comorbidities like autism and narcissism. Much harder to use the same "it's the social stigma" argument gay rights used.
That is the irony about this entire movement: it depends heavily on the alleged huge suicide rate of transpeople to leverage sympathy yet this line of argument is very susceptible to trans people simply being mentally ill. I'm honestly surprised how successful tap-dancing around the contradictions are, but that might be because nobody dares to actually challenge constructs like "trans kids"
This is true, but I don't see why this a 'charge' rather than merely a fact that is not at odds with viewing medical transition as something often legitimate and necessary. After all, it may be, and in my view is, the case that transition is simply a/the treatment for, yes, the disorder of gender dysphoria.
You're not thinking like an activist. It poses a few problems:
Trans identity would then be behind the gates of doctors which prevents self-definition (a central value on the left) and - more cynically - limits the numbers of "transpeople" and thus the demands one can make in their name. It's a founding tactic of the "LGBT movement" to seek strength in numbers.
IMO this argument can easily slide into trouble, not least because it implies the metaphysical claim that TWAW is nothing more than a tool to manage/mollify mentally ill people and not fact. This immediately raises concerns about how far we should go in accommodation or how much you can judge a person for not playing along. They much prefer the deontological view implied by TWAW.
What if we continue to study this condition and discover something...embarrassing that doesn't fit with the narrative (e.g. autogynephilia as a motive which doesn't really fit the narrative).
If activists are going to be allowed to take the maximal stance that allegedly avoids all of the problems (even if it places it on others) then why wouldn't they take it and avoid awkward issues?
It may indeed be. But would this be the phrase used for allowing anorexics to starve themselves? We would need absolutely overwhelming evidence before we allowed this, especially with children. Do we have this for transpeople, especially the younger cohort that are unlike the previous generations?
See: this is what I'm talking about. I think there's been a rash of less-critical behavior around this precisely because it isn't just seen as treating a medical disorder but the next fight for human rights/dignity. This is why activists talk about "trans kids" and not "kids suffering from dysphoria, most of whom will likely desist after puberty unless on puberty blockers". The latter has far less force.
At this point Finland, Sweden, the UK have all rolled back and criticized some elements of childhood medical transition. America and Canada are not on the same boat and apparently are going full steam ahead. Would everyone have gone this far for a minority that was purely recognized as mentally ill?
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As a society, we treat psychological problems (faulty software) with psychology (reconfiguration of internal reality) and psychiatric problems (faulty wetware) with medications.
Gender problems are treated by a combination of heavy body-altering hormones and vivisectionist plastic surgeries ala The Island of Dr. Moreau. Psychological treatment (“conversion therapy”) is illegal in many jurisdictions. This is considered the most humane treatment because of the high, high statistical likelihood of suicide at every stage including after transition.
Meanwhile, I personally know someone whose lifelong body dysmorphia was resolved with a single moment’s realization he’s described to me in detail. He was a species dysphoric furry, an amputee fetishist/wannabe, and an autogynophile-type trans-null-gender whose Erotic Target Location Error was seeing the essence of womanhood as penislessness, not vagina-having. He said that, up until that moment, he wished thousands of times he could just have “nullo” surgery to remove the hateful appendage, without a constructed vulva in its place. But because nullo is “unnatural,” he figured no ethical surgeon would have done it and never investigated it. Now he’s perfectly fine with being a four-limbed human man with functional male genitals.
It scares me to think that if nullo surgery (with hormone-replacement for the missing balls) was the societally approved genital transition for his issue, which turned out to be psychological, he’d be regretting it now after that realization, possibly suicidally.
Not actually included, good eyes!
He told me he used to always change in the toilet stalls in locker rooms at school and at pools because he was shy and didn’t want anyone to watch. His father confronted him once about not being a real man if he was afraid of being seen nude, and he remembers thinking, “Well, then I don’t want to be a man” with the finality of a decision.
It was that moment he remembered when he was pondering why he wanted to see a film about trans people. He said a hundred things clicked together at once and then fell away like a curtain. He told me that after that, he kept trying to feel the old dysmorphic ache for a different body for a year, like probing an empty tooth socket reflexively with your tongue, but it was just gone.
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That is true if all one cares about is the culture war. If one cares about formulating sound public policy, esp about such an important issue as crime, not so much.
If you care about sound policy you need to use the same definitions on both sides of the equation to determine ratios.
If anyone in the not convicted of a crime side is allowed self-ID and only accused (or convicted?) can have that status revoked externally your numbers won’t work.
In the situation where trans women convicted of crimes can have that status revoked, you are automatically biasing your numbers away from criminality in that population.
If your true ratio is A:B and you change that to A-0:B-X the ratio automatically gets larger. Assuming of course X>0, but if it isn’t, it’s kind of a silly argument anyways.
That’s the math part. The politics part is there has been an argument from the beginning that if self-ID is the only requirement then there will be bad actors. We should not use it for this very reason.
Originally the the response was that no one would lie about this so we shouldn’t be concerned.
Now it feels like the response is of course those bad actors couldn’t really mean it, so we shouldn’t count bad people on our side, they’re on yours.
I have tried to make clear that whose "side" the bad people are on is not the issue I am concerned about. It is who actually commits crimes. In order to determine that, we have to look at their identity at the time they committed the crime.
If every gang member who is put in prison foreswears their gang in order to get benefits (as supposedly some inmates claimto be trans), would you infer that,because no one in prison is a gang member, gang members do not commit a disproportionate number of crimes, and hence the authorities shouldn't worry about those gang members downthe street? Of course not. Yet you seemto be advocating for the use of the same absurd methodology re trans criminals.
Nope, I’m saying that you have to remove liars from both sides.
It’s not absurd if your goal is accuracy.
Actual:Actual is reasonable.
Actual + Fakers:Actual + Fakers is reasonable.
Actual + Fakers:Actual
Is not.
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I do care about formulating sound public policy, which is precisely why I think that a) making self-ID the legal standard is a policy which will backfire horribly for the trans movement and b) I don't support allowing any male convict who identifies as a woman to be housed in a female prison, without any guardrails being imposed at all.
My point is that you can't have it both ways. Trans activists demanded that anyone who declares that they are a woman must be legally treated as a woman. That's the policy they sought. Having succeeded in having that policy implemented (at least in certain jurisdictions), they cannot then turn around and say "No no, Karen White is only pretending to be trans!" The policy they themselves called for draws no legal distinction between a person legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria and someone like Karen White.
You're confusing policy with statements of fact here. Just because someone might argue that self-ID is the best policy response to the issue of the status of transgender people, this does not mean that someone is arguing that everyone who self-IDs as trans must be telling the truth. So I could credibly argue that, in general, self-ID is desirable but that there may be exceptions in which a more rigorous standard could appropriately be applied.
All well and good, but the law in the country in which I live currently permits no such exceptions. Any male person who identifies as a woman is a woman in the eyes of the law, for all intents and purposes.
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Yes, I understand your point. My point is that, if we want to combat crime, we need to understand it, and you are advocating for intentionally using incorrect data. Let's replace transgenderism with autism. Let's suppose there were some benefit to claiming to be autistic in jail, such as better services or some such. So, huge numbers of inmates falsely claim to be autistic. The result is that, superficially, it appears that people with autism are extremely crime-prone. Would you advocate ignoring the fact that those inmates are lying when trying to develop anti-crime policy? I wouldn't think you would.
If "autistic person" was legally defined as "a person who claims to be autistic, no diagnosis required", then the only data we would have would be the data obviously skewed by bad actors.
I acknowledge the existence of people who falsely claim to be transgender (or falsely claim to be experiencing gender dysphoria). The law in the country in which I live explicitly does not acknowledge their existence. The legal concept of "self-ID" makes it literally impossible for a person to lie about being transgender: declaring it makes it so.
Again, everyone knows that Karen White isn't really transgender. Before self-ID became law, anyone who pointed out that the proposed legislation created a perverse incentive and a honeypot for bad actors was smeared as transphobic. Now that the (foreseeable! foreseen!) downsides of self-ID have become too obvious to ignore, trans activists are trying to turn around and say "but those people aren't really trans!"
Sorry, not having it. Anyone who was in favour of self-ID has to take the L and admit that it's their fault that malingering sex offenders are now housed in female prisons. If you support a policy which defines transgender people as "anyone who claims to be transgender", you don't get to pick and choose who will make such a claim.
You actually aren't disagreeing with me. Of course it is their fault that fake transwomen are in female prisons. But when trying to figure who commits crimes, we can acknowledge that while simultaneously noting that the crimes those people committed were not committed by transwomen, just as we can acknowledge, per my hypothetical, that autistic people do not commit a huge pct of crime, even if a huge pct of prisoners successfully claim to be autistic and thereby game the system. We can blame the autistic rights folks for the latter, even while doing the former when formulating criminal justice policy.
Sound public policy requires that the movement that pushed such grotesquely unsound policy be vanquished, lest it continue to impose unsound policy on us. As such, the single most important thing that can be done in response to this is what @Folamh3 is doing.
You're trying to convince him to put out a fire while the kid with matches and a can of gasoline is still right there going nyuck nyuck nyuck. I get it, the fire is a problem, but putting it out doesn't help until Mr. Pyromaniac is down for the count.
Sound public policy about prison housing might require trans activism to be vanquished, but sound public policy about crime does not, unless possibly transwomen are actually the source of a lot of crime, which we will never know if we follow Folamh3's path. He is literally prioritizing "owning" his outgroup over understanding the sources of criminal activity. He isn't putting out fires; he is making it harder for firemen to do their jobs.
I think you’re putting words into @Folamh3’s mouth. He is advocating for the recognition that yes, you can put out fires, but until you catch the serial arsonists you’ll still get houses getting torched on the daily, even on the same houses!
A sound public policy that is agnostic to trans activism may be sound policy in the abstract, but 1) it will directly contradict trans activist ideology and 2) it will mobilise a backlash from the progressives who will shit on the “sound policy” even harder than before. He isn’t asking for the firefighters to stop doing their jobs (and I have no clue how you could interpret it as that), but asking for the police and criminal court syste to step up their game.
To try to clear things up, I believe what he is aiming for is the recognition that sound public policy is incompatible with our current strain of trans activism a la:
Proposition. Current trans activism (and local public policy) asserts the primacy of self-ID, such that the individual’s assertion of gender self-identity trumps any other measure, including biological sex and any judgement by other people that determines otherwise.
Proposition. Individuals can be deceitful or mistaken in their declaration of gender identity.
Statement. (1,2) There is no method of clarifying whether any particular self-ID is genuine, mistaken, or malicious within trans activist policy (including that adopted by organisations and governments) and ideology, even when such claims are farcical.
Proposition. There is incentive for criminals to lie about their gender identity (broadly, for better conditions and forms of access to other prisoners while imprisoned).
Statement. (3,4) Criminals will lie about their gender identity in order to gain advantage, and trans activist policy adopted by institutions are ideologically unable to distinguish genuine profession of gender identity and bad faith profession, even in blatantly obvious cases, unless they repudiate (1) and reject trans activist policy (and incur the wrath of trans activists + allies).
Proposition. (2) Sound public policy regarding incarceration requires accurate information regarding gender identity (and/or sex).
Statement. (5,6) Sound public policy regarding incarceration is incompatible with trans activist policy, and trans activism more broadly. Ergo, to care about the crime issue, you have to care about the trans issue.
and that you are, for whatever reason, strenuously trying to avoid any association between sound public policy and trans activism by trying to claim that Folamh3’s statement taken as a whole is actually an endorsement of proposition 1 taken as a statement (???) rather than the entire thing that ends as a criticism of 1, and I am really not sure why you are doing that. You seem to be arguing against the same system Folamh3 is, rather than disagreeing with Folamh3, but for some reason don’t want to admit the same? It just reads so bizarrely.
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Not trans activism, leftist activism, and all its tentacles. It must be stopped on every front together.
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So now that it hits an in-group, to paraphrase Sartre, you "loftily indicate by some phrase that the time for argument (regarding the self-ID question) is past"?
That is quite explicitly what @Folamh3 is not doing.
Trans people are hardly my in-group; I find them rather tiresome.
That was indeed what Folamh3 was doing in their initial post, which was what I was referencing.
In that case I must apologize; it really did read to me like you were trying to deflect.
On the other hand I do still think that @Folamh3 wasn't initially saying "let's use incorrect data", but "using correct data has become radioactive because of trans activists, doesn't this suck", which is, of course, downstream of your own observation (and which you've noted).
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Sound policy is incompatible with self identification. Because people can lie or be wrong about their own nature.
This was and still is one of the major objections against the standard.
I submit that what you conceptualize as sound policy about crime is an oppressive norm, in fact.
I don't know what oppressive norm you are talking about, but the fact that people can lie or be wrong about their own nature is exactly my point. For example: People charged with crimes commonly claim to be mentally ill, in an attempt to mitigate punishment. If we want to know the relationship between mental illness and crime, we don't want to take those people at their word; rather we want to look at people who are actually mentally ill, or at the very least who claimed to be mentally ill before they committed the crime. Yet, re transwomen, the OP is advocating doing the exact opposite.
If your policy on sentencing the mentally ill is "they count as mentally ill when they say so", then that has to be the standard we use when analyzing what's wrong with the policy. That is not currently the policy for the mentally ill; it is currently the policy for trans people.
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And there it is, this is oppression. Because you're imposing your view of reality on them, using the cover of the idea that there is such a thing as "actually mentally ill", a doubly made up concept which is nothing but power.
At least that's quite literally what Foucault would say.
The current progressive philosophical paradigm is not equipped to deal with this problem, because subjective feeling is explicitly more important than objective reality in its hierarchy of concern. And if it was not so, transpeople wouldn't get the privileges they are afforded today.
Asking for coherence or some sort of standard to deal with the ground level problems generated by this view is never going to work or make sense within the paradigm because those problems are all assumed to be stemming from oppression in the first place (blame Rousseau for this one). And you are hence condemned to be a conservative, one who seeks to slow the bulldozer but ultimately is powerless to stop it or change its course.
Yes, I am sure some people would say that it is oppression, but who cares? You know, the American Political Science Assn just had its [annual conference]9https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa22/), and although a search of the conference schedule for "oppression" turns up 71 hits, a search for "modeling" turns up 447. And while the division on Critical Political Science had 9 sessions, the division on Conflict Processes had 56. There are, by the way, 56 divisions. I have been to that conference, and the people talking about real issues go the entire 4 days not caring what those other people are talking about in their little bubbles. So, yes, it is perfectly possible to determine whether people who identify as trans before going to jail and conveniently discovering their identity actually commit more sex offenses than average, or if they don't, regardless of whether some people deem that a form of oppression.
Much as it is in litterature, the people studying politics are some of the least likely persons to actually engage in it in any meaningful level.
You're coming at this issue from some sort of liberal issue based framework. But that's utterly ill equipped to deal with the issues of today. You're not living in a world where everyone shares that framework anymore, and in fact you live in a world where it's so thoroughly hacked that you can be used to produce anything up to the inversion of your ideals if manipulated correctly. Experts say. Sources confirm. New study shows.
I've seen it happen too many times now. If the stats are favorable they will be promoted, every redditor will quote them to you at the first chance. If the stats are not favorable, you'll be banned for even mentioning their existence.
All this quality scholarship about what we ought to do were we good little managers? It's all mere justification.
All this is really about is power. Which neither of us have.
It doesn't matter how many people get hurt by policy. It doesn't matter how well you can spin it either way in very respectable papers. This is just the process to legislate what has already been decided by those who can make the exception.
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So a persons word isn't the only factor in determining their true gender identity, an external investigator is needed to probe it?
Doesn't this invalidate the self-ID doctrine?
Self-ID is not a 'doctrine' but a policy. I very much doubt you can find any politician etc. of any prominence who argues that it is impossible to lie about gender ID. Obviously it is, the argument is that in some/most cases self-ID is the best choice even if there is a potential for lying, just as advocating for a more stringent system does not mean one believes that no genuine trans people will be erroneously denied a legal change.
It seems like we have enough evidence now though to finally state that, in fact, Self-ID is not the best choice, it's harmful and unjust. The only way at this point for activists to try to argue for Self-ID is to cite marginal benefits while excusing massive harms. And if that's the standard, than anyone can play that game, nothing's off limits.
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What does that have to do with what I said. Again, I don’t care about the trans issue. I am talking about the data issue: Either mentally ill people are unusually crime-prone, or they are not, and we can know that only if we look at people who are actually mentally ill when they committed the crime, rather than people who claim mental illness after the fact. The same applies to transwomen. So, as I said initially, if you care only about the culture war stuff, then "they made their bed" makes perfect sense. If, OTOH, you care about crime policy, it doesn’t.
Crime policy is "you look at people who claim to be trans and count them".
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Surely the culture war is interested in whether issues like these are sound precisely because they are influencing public policy around such important issues?
In which case:
This doesn’t read at all like “we should tolerate criminals”, but “progressives advocated for these paradigms; now that they are seen to be damaging, progressives should take the hit to credibility for supporting these paradigms.”
Your comment is truly an interesting rhetorical invocation of “privatising the gains and socialising the losses”.
No, my comment was meant to indicate that there are other issues at play other than what gains and losses might accrue to trans people. I.e.: our ability to get closer to understanding the causes of crime, which is compromised if we intentionally miscategorize those who commit crimes.
And the point of the original commenter was that the progressive position of self-ID is in contradiction to getting to these "other issues, i.e. our ability to get closer to understanding the causes of crime, which is compromised if we intentionally miscategorize those who commit crimes", as the progressive position is to deny the possibility for there to be such a miscategorisation in the first place.
Taking the broader progressive movement in mind, then, one cannot on the one hand take seriously gender self-identification as the sole marker of gender, then on the other hand ignore the predictable negative effects of that, and chastise other people for focusing on that this policy creates these negative effects - after all, there are "bigger issues" at play greater than mere self-ID!
That is simply rank hypocrisy.
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