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I think the real presentist error people make here is treating transgenderism and homosexuality as more distinct phenomena than they actually are. They're separate manifestations of a single underlying ancient pathology, which could have manifested in any number of other ways if our culture had developed differently. When conservatives express tolerance towards homosexuality and disgust towards transgenderism, it's a clear example, IMO, of not being nearly as free from the ideas of the surrounding culture as you think you are. The deviancy of homosexuality is downplayed and the dangers of transgenderism are exaggerated. They're the same basic life-destroying contagious confusion about the binary of sex. If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.
You might not endorse homosexuality but I'm reasonably confident you and homosexuals would both agree on the basic facts of the matter: Homosexuals are people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex. Right or wrong, good or bad, nice or nasty, nobody is arguing about what the term signifies. Nobody is claiming that a man who wants to have sex with men isn't a man who wants to have sex with men.
Transgenderism advocates and trans sceptics don't agree on the ground level. Transgenderists believe that they can stop being what they are and become what they already were if only they weren't what they already are, which they're not, and want to stop being. Trans sceptics think that's self serving circular anti-sense.
Both homosexuals and transgenderists are nonconforming in certain aspects of stereotypical gender expressions but they have radically different interpretations of what that signifies. Gays interpret it as a subjective preference ("I like x"), trannies interpret it as an inversion of objective reality ("x, which is defined as not y, is y, not x").
You might not like gays but I suspect you'd find them that bit worse if they told you their having gay sex with other gays was proof they're not gay.
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Both of them present to me as outcomes of abuse by adults.
On what basis?
Last time this came up, that wasn’t supported by the stats for homosexuality. I really doubt it’s true for transgender kids either.
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Which conservatives, the classical liberals or the evangelicals?
Which homosexuality, the one that acts like any normal couple except same-sex, or the hyper-effeminate/5000 orgies a night type?
I agree with this, but not for the reasons you think; I think that there are different challenges for relationships that are built on the ancient exclusive prostitution agreement between a man and his wife (and the drives and personality types that make people prefer this arrangement), and those that are not for other reasons. Confusing the two on purpose because “the prostitution is the telos of a relationship” is itself a destructive and intellectually lazy thing; traditionalists and progressives do it because it’s psychological isolation from an infohazard.
I wouldn’t benefit from constantly being reminded that some people have more secure relationships either- that's kind of why marrying a virgin is really important to most guys, as a signal that the prostitute sees the sex work as work to be done (and her body as an asset), not as pleasurable in and of itself, which from an evolutionary biology standpoint is obviously as disordered as homosexuality is.
No it’s not, like even trivially most guys expect to have sex with their wives before marriage, and don’t seriously expect she never had sex with someone else? I have old fashioned views about sex and gender but I recognize that I’m in the minority.
What? Most guys want their wives to desire and enjoy sex with them.
Judging by the commentariat here, this is the overwhelming preference; that it isn't expressed in polite company doesn't make it untrue.
It’s the preference but clearly not the reality, both for the majority of married men here and in general. Men also “prefer” tall, hourglass blondes with huge tits and perfect faces and women “prefer” 6’5 billionaire bad boys with sexy voices, that isn’t the destiny of most people.
But if it is the preference, then naturally men will put a higher SMV on women who haven't done that. (This is simply describing an emergent system property; I'm not making a moral judgment about those things or otherwise Slootposting.)
As I’ve argued, though, high status men seem to marry whores all the time.
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See eg
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I can’t agree with that.
There’s a cluster of traits which I find attractive. That doesn’t give me any interest in expressing those traits.
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I simply do not agree that these are similar modes of thinking. I've known many homosexuals and many transgender people and they are not the same or have the same issues or challenges insofar as they aren't both things at once.
It really is something different. If only in terms of mental stability.
We can put it all in a big bucket called "sexual deviancy" as people did at various points in history, but it's a thought terminating cliché that allows us to learn nothing helpful to mitigate the outcomes of either.
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How are homosexuals "confused about the binary of sex?" Maybe I don't know enough homosexuals but -- I get the impression that lesbians don't like transwomen, by and large. It seems to me that the homosexual lobby and the transgender lobby can be at odds with each other. The only way I can consider them similar is through the powerful outgroup homogenizing lens of "they repulse me" and "they are about gender." Was women entering the workforce another manifestation of that pathology?
The only thing I can think is the gender non-conforming behavior of some homosexuals, who perform the gender/sex roles of a sex they're not (studs, femme male homosexuals). I don't know that "confusion" is the right word there. They're not confused like transpeople who claim to be women, they're deliberately non-conforming.
If you remove medicalization the boundaries get much fuzzier, because there's really no sharp dividing line between these things and "trans". They're all just varying levels of gender non-conforming behavior with more or less psychological instability thrown in.
Seriously asking as someone who doesn't pay much attention to LGBT foundation myths:has it been that way historically? A transwoman didn't throw the first brick but does anyone deny that they were part of the same club of non-conformists (along with drag queens and studs and so on) that we now call the "LGBT movement"? I've not seen anyone debate Marsha P.'s membership, just his centrality (or self-identification)
Gay and trans were absolutely part of the same club back in the day, and coincidentally pretty much the only people who wanted to live as the opposite sex at that time were super effeminate gay men and super butch lesbians. Nobody in 1980 would ever have anticipated the modern phenomenon of straight men putting on dresses and calling themselves trans lesbians, nor the prevalence of the religious belief among young women that such men must be respected and treated as women in all ways.
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"Confusion" is just what a straight person calls it, because everyone is straight, obviously.
I have never been "confused" about who or what I am (even through the time when most straights 'wake up'- that time being puberty, which must naturally be why most straights believe that time to be "confusing" to them). I find the notion that I ever would be kind of insulting, but I keep that to myself because expressing that is not generally beneficial.
Once you hear that, you have two options- you can accept it and move on (maybe make up some academic-sounding term for people who do that), or you could choose to get turbo butthurt over it, cry to some under-worked authority figure, and take the word the neutral[ish] people used and use it as a weapon because it makes you sound as smart, which automatically makes you better than everyone else.
Which is why that cluster of non-straight behavior belongs together. I figure sexuality is probably made up of a bunch of modules, and sometimes some people do not get the "correct" ones. Personality may then either enhance or corrupt this (or indeed might back-fill sexuality if you either don't have one or are out of a situation where it's relevant); so what might be productive for one group to do might be extremely destructive if another group does it, and vice versa.
Obviously in 2024 a woman who wants to be in the professional workforce is normal and doesn't have a defective brain module. Can the same be said of the woman in 1950? Would people (you, or others) lump the 1950s woman in with queers and call her "confused" because she is non-conformist? Would people not lump her in with queers, because queers gross them out, but she's just a little weird?
The only wrench in my argument is there may not be such a woman in 1950 - or rather, any woman in 1950 that wanted to be in the professional workforce was probably also a butch queer.
Tomboys, especially the older ones, will complain to no end about people doing exactly this.
It's probably technically accurate based on how I've observed them to act, but it's obviously not particularly productive to say that (and they're certainly not "confused"; this is what I mean when I complain about the normies picking up descriptive/academic terms and using them as weapons). It's also not really non-conformist-with-intent, which is what most people mean when they say that; that is just the way they are, and that is fine.
This can cause some problems for men who want/need to be the only one filling the dominant (male) role in a relationship; we don't exactly publish "how to be gay married in a straight relationship" books... since the only people who would ever read them are the ones that don't need to.
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There were professional women in 1950, and nobody thought that made them men. This post has mostly women who were in traditionally female professions, but also has a "security sales woman", pharmacists in training, a machinist, and a sales engineer.
Obligatory: what's a man?
(If you consider a 'man' to be a 'human doing' rather than a 'human being' it... actually kind of makes more sense to consider women who do that men in this context- but there's a right way and a wrong way to do that.)
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