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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.

According to Spiked:

In the tiny Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast, almost 50 people have legally changed their gender since 2023. The vast majority of them work in the military or police – and 39 of them have changed from male to female. Only four of them have even bothered to change their names.

...

Aside from growing his hair slightly longer and wearing earrings, Perdigones has apparently made no effort to present as a woman. He hasn’t even bothered to shave his beard.

I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.

Spiked

The author of that Spiked article has a hilariously large blind spot. She claims it is outrageous that men can change their legal gender to get around 'gender-based violence' laws and to get higher salaries and pensions. She apparently has no problem with laws that give women arbitrarily higher pensions and salaries, and which protect only female victims of domestic violence and only if the aggressor is male.

A lesbian abused by her partner (bearing in mind that lesbian relationships are the most abusive type of the three male-female pairings) has no such protection, neither does a man victimised by a male or female partner.

She apparently has no problem with laws that give women arbitrarily higher pensions and salaries

Well, of course not. Why would she? Feminists believe that women are oppressed by living in a patriarchal society, and publicly mandated higher pensions and salaries are a band-aid intended to ameliorate the differential treatment women receive as a result of their sex. When male people claim to be women to take advantage of these policies, they're taking something which by rights they aren't entitled to, no different from stolen valour, or malingering to receive disability compensation you don't deserve. You might disagree with one or more points of her worldview (is it accurate to characterise the way women in the West are treated as "oppressive"? are Western women worse off than Western men, ceterus paribus? are higher pensions and salaries a fair or effective way of remedying this treatment? is the way Western society treats trans people qualitatively and/or quantitatively similar enough to the way it treats female people that trans people deserve the same compensation? etc.), but it's far from inconsistent.

A lesbian abused by her partner (bearing in mind that lesbian relationships are the most abusive type of the four male-female pairings)

I've heard this asserted so many times, but I've seen precious little hard evidence to back it up, and the more I see an assertion being made without any supporting link (e.g. "there are parts of the US where it's literally not a crime to murder trans people!") the more uneasy I get. I'm not saying this claim is false or made in bad faith, I would just really like to see some actual evidence in support of it rather than taking it for granted.

This article gives victimisation numbers of 66% 61% for bisexual women, 44% for lesbians and 35% for straight women. It does cite its sources but when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything, frustratingly. I think its citing this study. Pages 1&2 have the headline figures which match up.

Thanks for the link, this is really helpful. Unfortunately, the second link suffers from a limitation I suspected the last time this topic came up: not specifying the sex of the perpetrator.

This is obvious in the case of the proportion of bisexual women who've been victimised (i.e. that finding is perfectly consistent with 100% of the bisexual women who reported victimisation having been victimised by a current or former male romantic partner). But less obviously in the case of lesbians reporting victimisation: just because you currently identify as a lesbian doesn't mean you always did, or that you were never in a romantic or a sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex. There's no contradiction between currently identifying as a lesbian and previously having been in a relationship with a man who beat you up or stalked you. There's even a hypothetical causal mechanism worth investigating baked into the finding as it stands: if a significant proportion of lesbians are "political lesbians" who decided to swear off men after being abused by an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband (and straight women are disproportionately likely not to have been abused by an intimate male partner), then you would logically expect the proportion of lesbians who've been abused by a male partner to be higher than among straight women. Given the wording of the question as it stands, it's entirely possible that many of the bisexual or lesbian women surveyed have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman.

Going even further than the above, I've met more than one woman who called herself a lesbian despite currently being in a romantic/sexual relationship with a cis male boyfriend. There are probably plenty of women in relationships with trans women who still consider themselves "lesbians" (while being penetrated by their "girlfriend's" feminine penises, but that's neither here nor there). The wording in the study is sufficiently ambiguous that I can't even be confident that the set of "women" surveyed doesn't include trans women: maybe some of the lesbians and bisexual women reporting abuse in that study were trans women who'd been abused by a current or former romantic partner who was also a trans woman (in other words, male-on-male domestic abuse).

None of this is to argue that female-female romantic relationships aren't more likely to be abusive than male-female romantic relationships: the data you've presented are entirely consistent with that hypothesis (which I'll call Hypothesis A). My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis (Hypothesis B) outlined above, in which many of the lesbians and bisexual women who report intimate partner violence were actually abused by current or former male partners. To properly disambiguate which of the two hypotheses has better explanatory power, you would need to ask followup questions like:

  1. What is the sex you were assigned at birth?
  2. What is your sexual orientation?
  3. Have you ever been physically, emotionally, sexually abused by a current or former romantic partner?
  4. If "Yes" to Q3, what sex was the partner who abused you assigned at birth? (If you have been abused by more than one current or former romantic partner, please list the sexes they were assigned at birth sequentially.)

Minimally ambiguous language like the above would give us a more accurate impression of the relative sizes of the four populations (females abused by female romantic partners, females abused by male romantic partners, males abused by female romantic partners, males abused by male romantic partners) and give us better insight into whether Hypothesis A describes reality more accurately than Hypothesis B.

A caveat to the above: if I'm reading table 5 on page 20 correctly, zero lesbians reported being forcibly penetrated by a current or former romantic partner, which is far more consistent with Hypothesis A than with Hypothesis B.

My point is that the data are equally consistent with the alternative hypothesis

I would say that the data are potentially consistent with your hypothesis, but I certainly wouldn't say they are equally consistent. If you're determined to find an explanation for lesbians reporting the highest rates of domestic violence victimisation, without accepting that lesbians might be perpetrating the largest amount of domestic violence, then your hypothesis can seem plausible. To me, it looks like an isolated demand for rigour.

I don't see why it's an isolated demand for rigour. If we lived in a world in which:

  1. 100% of the people identifying themselves as lesbians were female
  2. 100% of the people identifying themselves as lesbians exclusively dated and had sex with other female people (both currently and historically)

then the statement "X% of self-identified lesbians report having been abused by at least one romantic partner" would be synonymous with the statement "X% of female people who exclusively date other female people report having been abused by at least one romantic partner, who was female". But there are lots of ways in which people using language in sloppy or careless ways complicates this simple definition:

  • many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)
  • many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male
  • many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person
  • many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (a sufficiently common phenomenon that the term "gold star lesbian" was coined to describe the subset of lesbians who've never had sex with a man - the converse is very common as many female people take some time to fully understand their own desires)
  • many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)

In fact, it's not "isolated" at all: I think essentially any survey of this type suffers from the lack of specificity described above. If you carried out a survey on what proportion of people with or without mental illnesses had been victimised, the self-diagnosis trend would make the data trivial to contaminate: you've no way of distinguishing between people formally diagnosed with depression by a qualified healthcare provider vs. people who diagnosed themselves (because they feel sad sometimes). Without knowing the relative rates of the truly mentally ill vs. malingerers, your data tell you essentially nothing.

Either design a survey with better questions, or collect hard data. Healthcare providers can make inaccurate diagnoses, but as a rule, statistics on how many people have been diagnosed with depression cannot be contaminated the specific way surveys can. Likewise criminological data: if I was shown evidence that the proportion of female people who've been convicted for battering a female romantic partner was twice as high as the proportion of male people who've been convicted of battering a female romantic partner, I'd be satisfied. (If such evidence was presented, someone would probably make the counter-argument that police and directors of public prosecutions look the other way when a man batters his wife, but come down like a tonne of bricks when a lesbian playfully slaps her girlfriend, because Muh Patriarchy™. I would not be the one to make that counter-argument.)

many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)

many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male

many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person

many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (a sufficiently common phenomenon that the term "gold star lesbian" was coined to describe the subset of lesbians who've never had sex with a man - the converse is very common as many female people take some time to fully understand their own desires)

many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)

These are all weasel words. 'Many' could mean 0.001% (which still ends up being thousands of people since we're dealing with nationwide statistics).

I honestly don't believe that 1, 2, 3 and 5 have any significant effect on the numbers. 4 could well do, but the onus is on you to show that, not to preemptively dismiss a survey whose results you evidently don't like. After all, if we take the 'definitions aren't 100% clear' approach to any other survey we could perform the same kind of muddying the waters on its results.

In an effort to put hard numbers on some of my previous claims:

  • "many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)" - This report from the Williams Institute says that "Of the 1.3 million adults [in the US] who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming." - annoying that they can't just list sex somewhere to make my job easier. I assumed that the GNC people were fifty-fifty male and female (which is obviously an assumption on my part). Based on this assumption, there are 686,100 trans women or gender non-conforming males in the US (or in other words, there are more than 600,000 males in the US who could be expected to refer to themselves as "women").

  • "many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male" - see this comment:

I found this survey from 2011, which surveyed 6,450 transgender or gender non-conforming people in the US and dependent territories. On page 35 there's a pie chart showing the sexualities of the MtF respondents. 29% described themselves as gay/lesbian/same-gender attracted, 31% as bisexual, and 23% as heterosexual. (I have no idea what "queer" means in this context.) I'm interpreting "heterosexual MtF" to mean "a trans woman who is exclusively attracted to cis men", and "lesbian MtF" to mean "a trans women who is exclusively attracted to cis women", but I wouldn't be remotely surprised if even some of the survey respondents were confused by the wording of the question and gave an answer they didn't intend.

If I'm interpreting this correctly, at least 60% of American trans women are attracted to cis women and at least 54% are attracted to cis men. So while you're correct that trans women are vastly more likely to be interested in having sex with cis men than cis men are, it's not like the sexuality demographics of trans women are identical to cis women. The overwhelming majority (something like 86%) of cis women are exclusively attracted to cis men, whereas only a quarter of trans women (as of 2011) are.

So of the 686,100 trans/GNC women in the US, 29% are exclusively attracted to females, or 198,969. According to this poll, 1% of Americans identify as lesbian. Hence, we can assume that 6% of the lesbian population of the US is male. 6% isn't much, but it's far from a rounding error. Also note that we aren't comparing like with like: the Gallup poll is from 2023, the NTDS survey is from 2011 and the Williams Institute report is from 2022.

  • "many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person" - I admit I couldn't find hard data on this one.

  • "many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person" - my first slam dunk of this comment:

There were 7929 respondents. The analysis sample for this article consisted of 6935 women from the 50 United States who identified themselves as lesbians on the basis of their response to the first item of the survey, "How do you describe your sexuality," with the following response options: (1) homosexual, gay, or lesbian; (2) bisexual; (3) heterosexual or straight; and (4) not sure... Of the respondents, 77.3% reported ever having had a male sexual partner, 70.5% had engaged in vaginal intercourse at least once, and 17.2% had engaged in anal intercourse at least once (Table 2). Among women who had engaged in vaginal intercourse, the mean age at first intercourse was 18 years, and the mean age at last intercourse was 25 years. Our data showed that 5.7% of respondents reported having had 1 or more male sexual contacts within the preceding year. Respondents in this study also reported a history of ever having participated in the following sexual activities with men: kissing (94.5%), mutual masturbation (64.0%), fellatio (62.0%), and cunnilingus (62.3%).

In 1999, not just a significant proportion but in fact the overwhelming majority of American women who identify themselves as "lesbian" have had sexual experiences with at least one male partner. If we scale that up to the Gallup poll estimates from 2023, of the roughly 3 million lesbians in the US, 2.31 million have had at least one male sexual partner. "Gold star" lesbians are a minority.

(I would expect that a more recent study along the same lines would find that the proportion of self-identified female lesbians who've had at least one male sexual partner has shrunk in the intervening 25 years - not because of any cultural shift in the lesbian community, but as part of the secular trend towards sexlessness which affects hetero-, homo- and bi-sexual people alike.)

Interestingly, this study was published in an effort to raise awareness among healthcare providers that just because a woman describes herself as a lesbian, doesn't mean that the healthcare provider can safely assume that she hasn't contracted an STD from penetrative sex. This seems closely related to our current discussion.

  • "many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)" - see the previous point, 5.7% of women who identified themselves as lesbian have had at least one male sexual contact in the past year, which is close enough to "current" for my purposes. Based on the Gallup poll estimates, this means that of the roughly 3 million lesbians in the US, 171,000 have had a male sexual partner in the last year.

Again, not an isolated demand for rigour. Almost three-quarters of women who describe themselves as lesbians have had at least one male sexual/romantic partner. This has obvious implications when surveying lesbians about whether they've been abused by a current or former romantic partner - you cannot simply assume that all of their current or former romantic partners are female. Indeed, when conducting a survey of this type you should assume that at least one of the person's former partners was male.

Well for starters I'd like to point out that I'm not "dismissing" this survey (certainly not "preemptively" dismissing it: I read a significant chunk of it). I'm pointing out limitations, both in how this specific survey is designed and the general concept of a survey as a tool for investigating epidemiological questions of this type. I'll do some digging and try to find estimates for what proportion of lesbians have had at least one male romantic partner etc. To reiterate, at least one finding in the study (relative rates of reported nonconsensual sexual penetration among lesbians, bisexual women and straight women) is essentially impossible to reconcile with my alternative hypothesis and far more consistent with your reading - does that sound like something I would say if I was "dismissing" this study and its relevance to the debate?

when I crtl+F for 66 I can't find anything

Possibly because the number the article claims is 61, not 66? Might also be some rounding going on, or combined numbers, which'd foil ctrl-f.

As one Ceuta-based army corporal, Roberto Perdigones, explained in El Español: ‘For changing my gender, I have been told that my pension has gone up because women get more to compensate for inequality. I also get 15 per cent more salary for being a mother.’

Ex-Dudes Rock. Southern Europe, particularly Spain and Italy, has an unusual combination of bureaucracy gone mad and extremely ineffective architects of bureaucracy. I hope the entire Spanish Army catches on to this grift.

I absolutely expect half of the men from my region to instantly convert to the female gender if gender switching is introduced and being a female let you pay less taxes or whatever.

Lot of gypsies in Slovakia split up after child benefit was capped at three kids...

Somewhat related: I know a few couples for whom legal divorce and living together filing separate taxes would be a decent federal income tax break (this can be the case for dual-moderate-income families). But I know nobody who has actually done this, even if it has come up in conversation, and even if only on paper and remaining "married" in a common-law and spiritual sense.

I think it's reasonable to assume that a male who's unwilling even to change his name to signal his commitment to his newly discovered gender identity is unwilling to remove his testicles or undergo hormone therapy.

Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?

FWIW, it does seem like the truscum side is at least coherent and it's possible to make meaningful policy based around their demands. Gender dysphoria (regardless of its etiology) exists, and adding a bureaucratic process to classify people as truly trans or not seems like a bare-minimum requirement if you want to have any social institutions that take into account sex/gender.

As someone who has become deeply radicalized (and the truscum types lost anyway so who cares?) I'm not sure that their position is attractive either.

Gender dysphoria existing doesn't necessarily justify turning everyone into, essentially, a care provider to people with that condition by affirming their identity. Or being forced to deal with the inevitable externalities that come with allowing such changes to their perceived sex. They simply aren't women, even if they have a condition that makes them want to be and acknowledging it is dangerous.

Arguably the attractiveness of the "truscum" position is partly because it coincided of both low visibility of transpeople and also just a lower level of ability in legally enforcing their claims. One of these is intrinsic, the other contingent.

And, of course, there's the argument that the sort of society that wants to Be Kind^(tm) in this way simply will not/cannot maintain that sort of sharp distinction.

We only have a couple of examples but...

Two years ago I wrote an article (https://open.substack.com/pub/firsttoilthenthegrave/p/pay-no-attention-to-that-opinion-banner-open-in-app; scroll down to section VI, everything prior is about motte-and-bailey fallacies) which included an argument that society might consider housing trans women convicts in women's prisons conditional on their undergoing an assessment by a qualified mental health professional to determine whether or not they legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria. As much as I might complain about the absurdities of gender ideology, I am sympathetic to trans males who legitimately suffer from gender dysphoria, and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men. Of course there will be false negatives and false positives, but I feel like a certain amount of medical gatekeeping would go a long way towards separating violent opportunists like Karen White and Barbie Kardashian from the harmless men in genuine psychic distress who wouldn't hurt a fly. I feel like this is a compromise most well-meaning trans activists could get onboard with (particularly as it's dramatically less restrictive than the other popular gatekeeping proposal: making access to women's spaces conditional on having undergone bottom surgery).

and you don't have to be a genius to see that a small fragile male like that is going to absolutely get his shit ruined if he serves his sentence in a man's prison surrounded by violent, sexually frustrated men.

  1. Why did "small" sneak its way in here? Is this an established thing with people who suffer from GD?
  2. This argument always runs into the "what about the twinks?" question. What about a feminine gay man? They should risk rape unless they get marked as a GD haver?
  3. Why are whatever solutions we use to prevent rape for all men not good enough? And, if not, why shouldn't they be improved for all men instead of letting some men secede?
  4. I don't actually know that we can know that these men "wouldn't hurt a fly". We separate men from women precisely because we can't know or we'd use this screening method to have mixed-but-peaceful prisons. Mental illness doesn't make men harmless, especially to women who are weaker and less aggressive. There's an argument that they could be less violent than the median male inmate and yet still be violent enough to change female prisons negatively for female inmates.

I agree, you're right that policy is based on tradeoffs not ranking holy victims who get all that they want. My argument would be that sex segregated prisons (like sex segregated sports) are that compromise and the new versions don't actually cause significant improvements for the problems they cause.

I don't see how we've even put aside the "absurdities of gender ideology" because at least three of the questions above seem to be responding to a view that depends, in some sense, on gender ideology. I do not see why transwomen should be treated as fundamentally different from other men with issues and women specifically should pay the price of fixing said issues unless gender ideology has some substance and truth to it and they are, in some sense, women. It feels like the ratchet gets turned by people who believe the absurdity and attempts to helpfix their problematic policy still grandfather in their assumptions despite us recognizing the absurdity.

I also just don't think it's politically viable. The very argument - vulnerable men can get raped and women should give up some of the public good of a prison that excludes males - that drives the argument will lead to people suggesting that maybe less men should be raped and standards will drop.

All excellent points which I hadn't fully considered at the time of writing.

The entire question of what to do with trans people in prison feels mostly like minority religious groups trying to help imprisoned co-religionists practice in prison. Kosher food, that kind of thing.

The entire small, vulnerable thing seems strange as a reason to be placed in women's prison. If a segregated unit for wusses is necessary, it can be created. But it isn't the women's prison.

Ironically, kosher food in prison is mostly served to non-Jewish inmates.

Of course you'd then run into the question "if you can create a unit for wusses, thus tacitly admitting there is unsanctioned violence in prison, then a) why is it there? b) why are you isolating only some prisoners?".

Having a bureaucratic process for transitioning is still better than the alternative. You've got to prove, to an outside observer, that you're "real." That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes, as well as empowering people to reject pure attention seekers as jokes.

It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.

That gets rid of transparently opportunistic schemes

The other thing that does this is let people transition socially if they want but simply insist that the only protected characteristic is sex.

It doesn't solve any of the root conflicts around "trans policy," but it makes them less salient and something you'd be less likely to have to deal with in your daily life.

The problem is that this danegeld has been paid once, and the outcome was predictable but not encouraging.

Related, but subtly different. The truscum/tucute debate is about who is allowed to call themselves "really" trans: truscums think that the category should be subject to medical gatekeeping, tucutes that it shouldn't.

I'm not debating whether or not these Spanish men are "really" trans, merely pointing out that it's reasonable to assume that they haven't medically transitioned, given that they've made only the most token effort at social transition. One would logically expect the set of trans women who have medically transitioned to be a subset of those who have made a full-fledged social transition (new name, pronouns, wardrobe, hair etc.).

Isn't this just the truscum/tucute divide?

Yes, and the tucute side has won through sheer exercise of social power. Now, we must suffer the consequences of the incoherence of their position.

I wrote a little more about that here. tl;dr: I think those are temporary aberrations that will not survive in the long run.

In the long run those men will have to justify themselves, but note that it will not require removing testicles. The idea that women cannot have penises and testicles and testosterone levels over 10 times the 99th percentile of cis-women is hateful bigotry spread by far-right domestic terrorists, after all. Instead, these proud transwomen must defend their gender identity in woke terms, with an oppression narrative, and of course plenty of political virtual signaling. A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.

A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.

Or, when it comes down to it, Cathy Young or Christina Hoff Sommers (both women-born-women), c.f. Peter Thiel is not gay. You want the good identities, you gotta get with the program, otherwise you might as well be a cis-white-male.

Luckily, our Constitution bans titles of nobility. In Constitutionalist America, no one is allowed to be black or gay, only the subaltern white or straight.

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