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I am once again asking you to have a little empathy for people you find disgusting
Let's start with an easier case.
I find male homosexuality disgusting. The idea of two men having sex makes my stomach turn. Even something like two men kissing makes me a bit queasy. And, separately, because I'm a Christian and take Christian sexual ethics seriously, I think it is (along with many other things) morally wrong.
It would be very easy for me to decide that, therefore, all gay men are sick perverts. There's more than ample evidence for that if I were inclined to take that position: bathhouse hookups, near-nudity at Pride parades, piss orgies. Case closed, right?
But I think we're all aware that that's not the whole story. When two men want to get gay-married, they are not, apparently, doing so merely to indulge in (and force society to be complicit in) some perverted sex act. Apparently, gay men actually fall in love, and actually form romantic attachments to each other. I know this because they say so, and because homosexually attracted men who think it's immoral talk about how hard it is, and because who on earth thinks getting married and tying yourself to another person is the easiest way to indulge in some perverted sex act; come on.
So I can have empathy for gay men. I know what it's like to be infatuated with a woman, to fall in love, to want to get married (I'm married myself) -- and, yes, to be sexually attracted and want to have sex, too. And I can imagine how insanely hard that would be, to have something wrong with your brain so that instead of having sexual and romantic attraction to the opposite sex, you have it to the same sex. And how hard it would be to have all those feelings of eros, of being-in-love, that scream to you from the rooftops that this is right and good and beautiful and what I'm meant to do, except unnaturally directed towards another man.
So yeah, I think that being homosexual means there's something mentally wrong with you, and that men having sex with men is sinful, and that it's not a good thing that we've normalized these things in our society. But I can also have empathy and understanding for their situation, and not insist at every turn that they're all perverted sickos who want to inflict their perversion on the rest of us.
But this post isn't about gays.
I keep seeing in these threads people talking about transsexuals as though they are all sick perverts who want to inflict their fetish on the rest of us. They can marshal evidence, of course, because, yes, there are trans people who are in fact doing something a lot like that. It's not as much evidence as in the case of gay men, but sure, it's there.
And it's not wrong that there's some sexual elements to transition. If you've not heard of Blanchard's typology of male-to-female transsexuals, here's the short version: There are, broadly speaking, two types of males who want to become female so badly that they will try to do it as best they can.
The first type are very effeminate males; they are attracted solely to men, they act like girls from a very early age, and they feel, often very intensely, that they are in the wrong body, to the point that it causes them enormous distress; in fact, their actual bodies are often somewhat androgynous. They have a good case that they have some prenatal hormone or endocrine issues that caused this cross-sex psychology. This type is very rare, probably less than one in ten thousand in the general population.
The second type are different. They are almost always attracted to women. They rarely displayed overtly feminine behavior as young children, and their personalities run the entire gamut of the male distribution. They often don't develop the level of distress (or obsession) that drives them to transition until later in life (though with the threshold for how motivated one has to be to transition coming down, more and more of them are transitioning earlier). This type is much more common, forming the majority -- and an increasing one, as barriers come down -- of males seeking to transition.
But the unique and startling attribute of this second type is that they find the idea of being or becoming female sexually arousing. This attribute Blanchard named autogynephilia, and to it he attributed the ultimate cause of their desire to transition.
Most "trans women" are autogynephiles.
But just as it's wrong to attribute the desire of gay men to get gay-married to their getting horny in perverted ways, it's wrong to attribute autogynephiles' desire to transition to the same. Insisting on doing so betrays the same lack of empathy that results in street preachers who think yelling at the gays about how they're sick freaks is the way to fix anything.
I don't want autogynephiles to transition. I think the messaging they are getting about how "wanting to be a girl is the number one sign of being a girl" (yes, an actual statement I've seen) is destructive and leads to foolish delusions about what they really are. I think most of them would be much happier -- and make those around them much happier -- if they would not indulge, not try to transition, not let this stuff blow up their lives and relationships. And I think that making your best disgusted face and yelling "it's a fetish" is the second-worst thing you can do, second only to the active encouragement they're getting from the trans movement.
So let me help you have some empathy. As it turns out, I have autogynephilia. (And no, before you ask -- I have never cross-dressed, not even in private. Not everyone is the same.) Let me tell you why -- in spite of the fact that I think it's wrong, and in spite of the fact that I know damn well that it doesn't actually work to change sex, I've been tempted by the siren song of transition. Here's a hint: it's not because it would help me to have orgasms.
I'm going to come back to the analogy of being in love. Not because it's exactly the same -- it isn't, not really -- but because it's the closest thing that most people have experienced to the emotions I'm trying to get at, and has many of the same complicating sexual factors. I'm going to assume you are a straight guy, because I am, and so are most of the people here. If you're not, feel free to fill in the sexes appropriately.
Let's say you develop an infatuation with a girl. You enjoy thinking about her. You want to spend time with her. Being near her is pleasant, and comforting, and a little exciting. You want her, just her, not instrumentally, not to do anything in particular, just her, for no reason and every reason. Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
So yeah, it's kinda like that. Sometimes there's a pure lust thing, too, just like a guy will imagine some girl and masturbate while thinking about her. But the primary thing, the reason transition has any appeal at all, is not that, any more than simple horniness is the reason a man in love wants to marry his beloved.
Sometimes -- during some periods in the past, at any time the thought would occur to me, which was quite often -- I want to be female. (And to be clear: although the intense desire to be female is not uniform, and it's less common now because I don't indulge it as deeply -- I've almost never wanted to be what I actually am, male, except instrumentally.) It's almost a primitive, axiomatic thing; a simple fact, not to be questioned despite its strangeness. My "ideal self" would have long hair and breasts and a round, sweet face, would wear dresses (but not makeup and heels, those suck), would not have a penis and testicles but a vagina and a womb and ovaries. Why? I don't know why, that's just what is. Sucks to be me that I'm actually male, unlike half the human population.
(Downthread someone mentioned the social attitude of "man bad, woman good"; unironically this is my own deeply felt and instinctive emotional response.)
For about a decade and a half of my lifetime, roughly between adolescence (maybe before; I don't remember) and when I got engaged, if you'd given me a magic button that would have instantly and permanently made me fully female, with all the right parts and functions and everything -- I would have pressed that button so damned hard you have no idea. I wouldn't do it now -- because I'm married, and I love my wife even more, and also because I have some concept for why my feelings on the matter are wrong -- but I'd still be sorely tempted.
Interestingly, I never really hated my actual body, as such. I don't like it; I don't like seeing myself in the mirror, I don't like my "equipment". But I don't have the kind of revulsion that some people report. Maybe I'm lucky after all; I mostly disliked my male body only because it wasn't a female one. But if I'd spent another decade single and investing in the fantasy of becoming a woman, instead of focusing on loving my wife and resisting those thoughts? Yeah, I'd probably be so miserable with my actual body, and so fixated on the fantasy, that I'd be willing to accept transition (hormones and surgeries and all) as the best I could do.
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
If it were about the dude in a dress and his particular emotions, it'd be so nice little summer problem. I mean sure, there are mean people around that would bully everybody who's different, and they'd want to bully the dude in a dress so hard because it's so easy. But that's like 1970s problem. We are in 2024 now, and our problems are much different. Our problems are the dude in a dress now is the school teacher, and the parents aren't even allowed to know what and how he is teaching the kids, and the dude in a dress has full unrestricted access to spaces where the girls and the women were supposed to be in the company of women and if you mention there's something wrong with that, you are the one who is suppressed. The dude in a dress is now the government functionary, and we're supposed to put up with his antics on the job and hire more dudes in dresses because otherwise we're nazis, and if he directs the vast machine of governmental oppression towards people he doesn't like - it's ok, the dudes in a dress deserve our deference, so we must say nothing.
We are supposed to literally think the dude in a dress is no different from any woman in any way from the moment he dons the dress. Nobody of course thinks that, but you are supposed to pretend you do, or bad things will happen to you. We are supposed to loudly proclaim things we know are false, because the empathy to the dude in a dress is more important than telling the truth. And this is not just a voluntary choice you can make out of sympathy for the dude - if you disagree, bad things are definitely going to happen to you. We are supposed to think a dude in a dress competing in sports with women is beating them easily (sometimes "beating" very literally) because of his great sportsmanship and not because he's a frickin dude. We're supposed to watch the dude in a dress convince mentally vulnerable kids to cut their private parts off and change their lives forever and think it's normal and a kid can't decide to drink a bud light until they are frickin 21, but they are capable of informed consent to overhaul their whole body biology forever in kindergarten. We're supposed to institute speech police and abandon freedom of speech (and freedom of scientific inquiry) because this particular dude may feel bad if somebody says something he doesn't like. While of course a dude in a normal attire does not get such reverence (not that I advocate he should, but at least that would be some kind of insane tyrannical equality). We're supposed to reform our whole language and culture and brand anyone who says something as vile as "pregnant woman" as a violent criminal, while actual violent criminals get away with wrist slaps at best, because see, it's the dude in a dress, shouldn't you have some empathy here?
You notice how it's not about the dude in a dress and his problems anymore?
I am not saying the old problem aren't a problem. I recognize it is. But it is not the problems that we as a society are dealing with right now. I'm very willing to have a little empathy for a poor dude with mental health issues (I'm even go as far as inventing some way to say "mental health issues" without it sounding demeaning, after all, there's nothing shameful in having a migraine, why it should be shameful to have broken gender identification?), but that is not helping with the real issues now. Sure, I am going to give the dude as much empathy as I can find in myself, but given how many of those dudes are involved in making the actual current problems worse, the reserves are limited.
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I generally agree with this post, so this is more in a further reply to your other post on small scale question sunday.
I would honestly suggest going through that 4chan /lgbt/ archive link I posted in the other thread. Just as an example. I'm a man in a relationship, with another man, and we're both relatively normal. Not feminine, not masculine. But I have AGP as well. I have sexual fantasies of being a woman. In fact they're the predominant type when it comes to fantasies. But in reality I'm attracted to men, and I'm not sexually attracted to women, I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with one either. And this isn't really an uncommon view among various transwomen I've talked to, or lurked around. Like in the agpgen link, despite being about agp, most people seem to be into men.
Another thing to consider is that some people have experienced becoming attracted to men after starting HRT. After all, if you hate your male body, it would make sense you'd hate homosexuality too, since it's just two men. It makes more sense for someone with gender dysphoria to hate homosexuals than someone without. But what if you were female? Would you want to be with a man then?
Otherwise I usually I avoid all openly trans spaces because the main topic of discussion there is being trans, which I don't care about. But if you find more private discussions it's a lot better. Which is why I like agpgen. It's inherently about sex, so people will tend to be more honest about what they really like, rather than what they say to look good to their tribe.
I see transitioning as a valid choice, even if our current technology is lacking when it comes to actually going through it. But if we had more advanced tech, or if there was, like you said, a magic button I could press that would turn me female, I'd press it without hesitation too.
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Sometimes societies just do crazy things. Consider foot-binding in China. Enormous amounts of pain and life-long infirmity inflicted on young girls for basically no reason other than it being high-status to have these small feet. The origin was in some dancer who the emperor praised, nobody is quite sure. It makes zero sense. The process is actually sickening to read about, wikipedia casually adds that the death rate from gangrene could be as high as 10%. There were full-scale wars less deadly than this 'cosmetic procedure'.
But it took on a life of its own. Foot-binding became a kind of resistance movement to the Qing dynasty (who tried to ban it several times but failed). We can only assume it was ferociously popular, a way of marrying up in society, conforming to norms. There must've been very deep and powerful emotions behind it, if it subverts a basic parental conception of 'not torturing your child'. But today it just sounds completely retarded to us and to everyone, especially the Chinese.
I agree it would be kind of hot to be a very attractive girl. But that's not something that's realistically possible. I have heard horror stories no less disturbing than foot-binding about those who try and fail. We should strive to think reasonably and logically before falling into either a collective or individual social phenomenon like this.
The trade-off of being a very beautiful woman is the extremely brief shelf-life. Female beauty, at least in terms of "hotness," is very ephemeral.
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No.
But only because my answer to all calls for empathy, unbidden and spontaneous, is no. I'm not going to participate in the hyperreal fixations of others. Nor am I going to be coerced into accepting the implicit axioms such worldviews come with.
Others may support you. I will not.
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Why does sex inherently contradict the former?
Seriously, I want to know, because it's very far from obvious to me; I tend to see the latter mostly as an extension of the former, but then again I don't get out much these days and my attraction heuristic has always been more "what body type predicts the former" than anything else.
I, too, consider Japanese sailor school uniforms unisex. Then again, I'm not really AGP either; the reason I don't do this more often is because most of the clothes don't fit/look bad. Girl clothing is generally softer and (to a point) warmer, so if you have the sensory-processing issues mentioned downthread, you're going to identify a bit more with them beyond mere sexual arousal (provided it fits, of course).
I take this one level higher: I think it's a bunch of wicked women (and men, but women have much more incentive to do this) who want to inflict sick perverts on the rest of us as an extension/entrenchment of the privileges they already enjoy. The wiser transpeople [the ones following the golden rule described in a sibling comment] are trying their best to minimize themselves/accommodate for other people (for the reasons below), and as such I don't have much problem with them. Most of the ex-women and ex-men I know are like this, but some of them are not.
I only want the wise ones to be capable of considering it (they're the only ones able to bear the costs, anyway). I want the answer to be "no, because you only want to do it to validate a certain obnoxiousness/only want to validate it just to shock the squares" for the wicked, and "no, because this isn't a productive or healthy option for you" for the simple.
Which is why you need a sensory processing disorder as a pre-requisite (usually from autism, but doesn't need to come from it, and autism tends to be used as an excuse to not fucking control oneself). I think it would be different if your body constantly reminded you that your dick exists, much as I find myself sensorily overloaded when I'm lying flat on my stomach for too long.
No, you just read what's presented to you rather than thinking about why it exists in the first place. It's the safe option. (At least Catholics bother to root it in "natural law".)
The main problem with accepting it (should you take seriously "who on earth thinks getting married and tying yourself to another person is the easiest way to indulge in some perverted sex act; come on" as seriously as you say) is the same as it is when you eat food sacrificed to idols- that it gives the wicked a #NotRealChristian division upon which they can prey, setting the wise (and wicked) against each other and driving off the simple. Which is obviously contrary to what should be one's objectives as a Christian.
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I've heard it pointed out that transwomen who embrace the female in long hair and flirty dresses never seem to connect with the unsexy but more psychologically and socially deep-rooted parts of stereotypical female gender performance, like being held responsible for emotional labor in conversations, over-contributing to household scut work, organizing office parties and remembering birthday observances, spontaneously volunteering care for the sick and elderly, feeling impulses or pressure to politely apologize, compromise and defer in conversations, feeling sorry for winning in a competition (because it hurts someone's feelings), fearing unwanted sexual contact and altering behavior to avoid it, fearing pregnancy and ditto, shouldering by default the more grueling parts of childcare responsibilities, etc.
Not all AFAB people experience all of these to the same extent, but I bet the proportion of women who experience their femaleness partly in one or more of these ways is vastly greater than the proportion who experience femaleness through short skirts, pert boobs and glamour makeup.
Might a real point of compromise be to clarify that AGP individuals desire to be, not women, but specifically hotties? It's possible that the few women who also self-identify as hotties would have an easier time embracing men who do the same, and it would clear up a lot of the issue for the many, many other women who feel that their womanhood is something more complex and fairly unconnected to hotness.
In my experience, they totally do. Not the pregnancy ones but the social through romantic ones. The o the point of loudly proclaiming how great it was to do housework.
I’d have said it was downstream of viewing everything through a gendered lens.
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What AGP individuals desire above all is attention for simply being. This also explains why even handsome and widely known men like Bruce Jenner would be AGP despite being objectively sexually successful, rich and famous (largely) heterosexual men. The reality is that 95% of women don’t really experience this, but male attention is so overwhelmingly focused on the hottest women, often without them even knowing, that they extrapolate this to the wider female experience. The trans fantasy - and this part is true for both AGP and HSTS - is to be a 95th percentile hotness woman. The rest of womanhood or womenfolk don’t concern them or factor into it at all. It’s like how acting students never imagine life as a merely moderately successful actor scraping by on bit parts and background roles in off-broadway shows and police procedurals; the fantasy is being the star.
I can see the appeal of transitioning to become male (if the button-push scenario were real versus hormones and surgery); menstruation is a horrid, annoying hassle at best, pregnancy and childbirth can have severe deleterious effects on the body, and men don't have to be very concerned about aging, because their eye wrinkles and gray hair are viewed as distinguished and not extinguished by society. Men who go overboard with botox and surgery come off kind of sad. Wearing makeup and cute outfits are the FUN part of being female.
But if I were to transition, I wouldn't look like George Clooney; I have female hips, testosterone can cause baldness, and I'm 95th-percentile female tall, but as a man, I'd be average. It's shallow of me, maybe, but I don't see a point to doing it without a serious gender dysphoria element if you're not going to pass easily and end up hot.
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There's a lot to unpack here.
You raise a valid point in that there are a lot of ugly/undesirable women who miss out on a lot of the benefits that conventionally attractive women get. But at the same time, I think the average woman (so, not outright ugly/disabled/etc, but decidedly not 95th percentile either) still underestimates how much attention she gets just for being a woman, because she's never had to experience the other side of things.
To put things in perspective: if you even have a "social circle", like at all, then you're already doing pretty damn well for yourself relative to the entire adult population. There's a non-trivial number of men, especially among the spergy AGP population we're talking about, that have essentially no friends or social connections of any kind. They got nothin'. There are women who find themselves in this sort of position too, but they're significantly more uncommon than their male counterparts.
If only the top 5% of women were experiencing substantial amounts of male attention, could feminism really sustain itself? It's a rare woman who doesn't have a story about a bad relationship, or at least an instance of catcalling or harassment, something. Clearly there are lots of women who are having lots of interactions with men! Otherwise the "gender wars" wouldn't be a political topic in the first place. For the type of isolated recluse who's been essentially invisible for his whole life, even the idea of negative attention like catcalling can become part of the erotic fantasy.
(I'll also just note that if you actually dive deep into AGP porn, you'll find a surprising number of "status loss" stories, i.e. rich white businessman gets transformed into a poor Mexican cleaning lady, things like that. It's not always a power fantasy of being in the top 1%).
Most friends are same gender (and most people heterosexual), though. Isolated men often aren’t even particularly ugly and lack of physical attractiveness (even if this is an issue for them) isn’t the primary reason they don’t have male friends. The reason men are more likely to be loners is likely biological, women make friends quickly but these friendships are more superficial, men have always had fewer friends but they tend to last longer and be ‘deeper’ in some ways.
Is she hot, though?
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Three separate objections, I guess:
Generalizing from the most visible member of a population is probably not a good way to draw conclusions about desire for attention. Most of the trans women I know very much care about unsexy, routine things so long as they can be labeled femme.
Wait, do you know any common fantasies that don’t involve being on the tail end of a bell curve?
In the spirit of the “male fantasy” meme, I think you could swap out “AGP individuals” for most any recognizable subgroup. They don’t just wanna be tradcons, they wanna be the 95th percentile tradcons, with a homestead and 11 children!
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That would certainly explain a lot. Including, potentially, the silly debate over "what is a woman". Because if by "a woman" they inadvertently mean "a 95th-percentile hotness woman," i.e. the concept of womanhood inheres in the hotness not vice-versa, then "I'm smokin' hot because I feel hot/ because I believe in my hotness" actually is a popular meme in the wider culture.
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One complication is the Golden Rule and private autogynephilia. Let me start with a three way sub-classification of private autogynephilia.
Repression It would be so easy to buy a dress on line or at a thrift shop and dress up and blush. No! That would be wrong. One makes ones mind a battle field and victory is not giving in to temptation.
Binge and Purge One gives in to temptation, dresses, make-up, maybe even a wig. Then one gets disgusted by what one is doing, and throws them away. But a year later one does it all again.
Limited, private indulgence One gives in to temptation. Release turns into relief, and one puts ones cross-sex items away, in a suit case or a drawer, knowing that one will be tempted again, and indulge again. But also aware that the over-all effect on ones life is negative. Without turning ones mind into a battle field, one tries to avoid temptation and leave off for months or years.
The Golden Rule is often written as
All three classes of private autogynephile see autogynephilia as a misfortune. It takes them away from seeking a girl friend or a wife. It takes them away from sublimating sexual impulses in other, satisfying alternatives. Yet it is so horribly unrealistic. They are a bloke, not a girl; autogynephilia involves fighting a war against reality and reality always wins. And they cannot expect any-one else to join in and humor them.
What would they have others do unto them? They hope that others will refrain from encouraging them. No "woman of the year" for a man. No "Stunning and brave" for a man. No inviting a man to use she/her pronouns. They hope to avoid cultivating and strengthening their fetish. They don't want to get outed. They don't want to have to say "please stop talking about positively about transition, because I'm both tempted and sure that it would work about badly for me." It is the same as when the ex-alcoholic is invited to go for a drink. He doesn't want to reveal his private past and he doesn't want to be cajoled.
And what then does the Golden Rule command them to do unto others? They see it as partly idiopathic and partly social contagion. They keep it private to avoid contaminating others. They oppose publicity and encouragement around transition. This is rooted in compassion for those with autogynphilia. It is a net negative for them. As best they can judge, it is a net negative for others. They wish to avoid harming others by encouraging the fetish, just as they hope that others will avoid harming them by validating and encouraging their fetish.
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Gay men generally don't want to do things that would have a different impact on other people based on whether they are gay. The trans do. There's also a lot of worry about trans children being encouraged into irreversible treatments, which isn't a problem for gay children.
Is your argument that Gay men are generally concerned at making sure that the men they hit on are gay, or that they are scrupulous at avoiding statutory? Because that is... debatable.
To the extent that they are not pushier than straights, this is a problem that happens with straights too. To the extent that they are pushier than straights, it's a problem, but it's not a problem with being gay; pushiness is not part of the definition of gay.
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Considering how many false positive trans kids would otherwise have just turned out gay, one could argue that gay kids are disproportionately affected.
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The trans debate suffers from the very common problem of "the most loud, obnoxious, and obvious members of a group come to represent the group in the broader population's minds".
Other examples of this phenomenon:
People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.
People thinking that individuals who are concerned about climate change are all annoying lefty activists who want to destroy capitalism.
People thinking that the majority of black Americans are inner city gangbangers.
Etc.
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people. On the left, there is a purity spiral - "Do you even support trans people at all if you criticize these trans activists for being obnoxious and insane??? How dare you??? Are you even a leftist?". On the right, there is the obvious motive to focus on the most annoying trans activists and act as if those people represent trans people in general, since that helps the right overall get a culture war win.
Personally, I have never had any issue with trans people. I just find many of the more vocal trans activists to be repulsive. Not because they are trans, but because they are shrill and irrational fanatics.
On a side note, one thing I find interesting when other men say that they find male homosexuality disgusting is that I do not experience this, to the point that it's hard for me to even understand having such a reaction. The idea of having sex with a man repulses me somewhat, but there is no moral dimension to this feeling, for me it's just a subset of "the idea of having sex with someone I am not attracted to repulses me". When I see two men kissing it does not bother me in the least bit. I do wonder why some men grow up finding male homosexuality to be a fundamentally disgusting thing and others simply don't.
One thing I've learned over time is that it's true, "love is love". To me, a loving homosexual relationship is much more beautiful than a bitter, hate-filled heterosexual one.
One thing I want to mention about your quote:
I think this is the classic "Madonna-whore complex". Or, more broadly, this kind of attitude is a limiting and in my view incorrect view of love and sexuality that separates it into, on the one hand, "pure beautiful love" and, on the other hand, "dirty sex". This is a very damaging way to exist, psychologically. It's damaging not just to oneself, but also to one's sexual partners. I say this as someone who used to have this kind of psychology when younger, but have since largely overcome it. I'm someone who is into some pretty kinky, rough, BDSM sex and I can say from experience that nothing about that kind of sex is incompatible with love and tenderness. Fulfilling each others' sexual appetites, no matter how raunchy and wild those might be, is one of the most loving things that two people can do for each other.
I'd like to bring up the opposite problem, too;
Vegans claim to never meet pushy, irritating vegans, and like to assert that those people simply don't exist. But the reason they don't meet them is because the irritating vegans simply have no reason to be preachy and irritating to someone who is already a vegan, creating a massive blind spot where they refuse to believe that the type of vegan who annoys meat eaters at every opportunity is not just made up because those people, who might even be standing right next to them at the salad bar, just never display those behaviours towards them.
While I think this is true to an extent, I have also noticed the people just seem to be defensive when they meet someone who doesn't engage in the same "vices" as them. I don't drink alcohol, and I'm not pushy about it. But I've had several encounters where someone offers me a drink, I politely decline, and then the tone of the interaction completely changes. I think there's something about seeing someone who is "pure" that makes some people act a little crazy in the moment, though I've never understood it - especially since I try very hard not to be santimonious about my temperance.
It has happend to me often enough that I've always wondered if half of the "pushy vegan" stories aren't just ordinary vegans who get read as "pushy" because of the emotions a person goes through meeting such a person. (My theory for the other half is that I think highly scrupulous people are probably neurodivergant in some way, and are more likely to be vegan/etc. Neurodivergant people aren't always known for their social graces, so I think those people might be clumsily pushy vegans as a result.)
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Wow, what a great point. And this applies to so many other groups, not just vegans. Thank you so much for this, I’m stealing this.
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Yet I'm sure you can name groups for which this doesn't happen much. This isn't something that automatically happens with every group; some groups have more extremists and less control over extremists, than other groups.
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Of course I have empathy. Trans-bashing has never entered my mind. It's more like, every trans person I've come across has some deep mental problems and not-being-a-woman isn't even foremost of them. They're neurotic. They're obsessed with porn. They hate their parents, and conservatives. They're pale and sickly. They cut their own hair and make awkward looking bangs. They only want to talk about themselves. You rarely come across a trans person that makes you think, "Huh, this is just a normal person that wants to be a girl". The rejoinder is: "Our fucked up society is the reason they turn out this way!" Which... yeah, sure. But if you agree society messed you up, isn't priority #1 then to repair the damage?
Actually, what bothers me about them is the odd double standard where they demand recognition from our society, yet refuse to play by any of its standards and so indulge in hypersexuality, self-harm, gross fetishes, disruptive behavior etc. which is what made the gays so hated in the past. If transexuals were otherwise healthy adults that acted like the opposite gender, almost no one would mind.
Only in America. Be all you can be and all that, tear down every fence and shatter every glass ceiling. If you're not who you could be, it's your fault, in the land of opportunity.
Oh, and you don't owe your fellow man anything. Why would you?
I share your disgust, but the targets are more broad. It's why cases where people see what works in American society and try and replicate it in their own makes me wince more than anything. The world has internalized their hegemony so hard that it genuinely believes the lies, often with awful results.
Hopefully this doesn't come off as too pedantic, but doesn't that imply it's not only in America? I'm probably just as disturbed by their cultural hegemony as you are, but in my experience it's so great that trying to draw a distinction between, say, American and European woke causes is rather futile. Maybe there is more of a distinction between the broader West and the rest of the world.
It's perhaps useful to compare the UK's case. Many of the same problems, some different.
They imported and swallowed BLM wholesale, right down to disruptive protests. The UK has no history of African-American slavery.
Or, well, I hate bringing this up because it's common knowledge and nobody cares about old hatchets, but pretty much the entire field of eugenics and progressive curation of the human genome to remove undesirable elements was cutting-edge American science... that the Germans followed to their own conclusions, with interesting results.
People copy America and import their memeplexes because America wins. America has some natural defenses against their own memeplexes, namely that everyone knows on some level it's all kayfabe. This is frequently missed by foreign observers, who are still at the "call a spade a spade" level of meta.
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I have empathy for those suffering from mental illness(like those who can’t tell what gender they are), but that doesn’t mean I go along with their delusions. Some things are just false. 2+2=5 men can get pregnant there’s more than two genders etc.
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I'm going to be blunt: I don't actually need to understand the various foibles people have ,anymore than they need to understand my own particular...weirdness (though I grant that it's harder to tell at a glance). I just need them to create a social structure where I can tolerate them with minimal cost to myself and the things I consider important, then I'll happily do so. Part of that is minimizing the burden I/they make of myself/themselves.
I was all aboard the acceptance train because I assumed this would be incredibly easy for transpeople (and it probably still is for the man who is merely in the dress - that bit has always been easier for me to manage). Insofar as some of us have changed our minds it's a direct result of us being told every which way that this is impossible.
Empathy (which has been utterly ruined, much like "tolerance", by activists) really has nothing to do with it. Look at the McBride situation: "empathy" doesn't really change anything about the fundamental difference of opinion about who belongs where that continually brings this small population to the front of the culture war. It's just a disagreement that we need to hammer out.
The only reason I know anything about "AGPs" is because I was looking for an explanation for absolutely deranging policies and some strange behavior. What needs to happen is that the salience of this stuff needs to be taken down and that has to be done via message discipline and realistic asks on the other side.
The less the average person has to think about this issue beyond "you do you" the kinder the discourse will be.
This. I think "don't ask don't tell" is an excellent policy that needs to be the norm in the entire culture. If I am not in or considering a romantic/sexual relationship with you, then I don't need to know about your weird fetishes, and you don't need to know about mine. Even if it's not weird, even if a straight man just really likes tits, I don't need to hear him announcing it and going on about it in public and making it his entire identity. It's tacky. Keep it to yourself, or talk about it in private with your close friends.
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See, to me there’s the “I hate people who do this” thing where everybody just dunks on whoever we’re talking about, calls them gross and disgusting, and tries to make them miserable. I think life is too short for that. And sure, there’s nothing to be gained by saying to a gay couple that they’re disgusting people, degenerates, and so on.
But the other side of tha5 is some bad behavior simply shouldn’t be normalized due to the knock on effects on society. The trans issues especially come with a lot of real, serious baggage. The WPATH files more or less show this, as does the literal explosion of kids under 15 or so suddenly deciding they’re trans and being given drugs. There might well be a case for “okay, fine, if you’re of legal age, you can do whatever with your genitalia and we’ll leave you alone for the most part.” I have reservations about restrooms and trans people being in positions of power over children. But I think for the most part, I’m like okay, this guy wearing a dress is 40 and shopping at Walmart, I don’t need to get out the pitchfork here, he’s not hurting anyone. I might not hire him to babysit, but beyond that, I think there’s something weird about people spending too much energy on it. Once the bad policies that open up the door to harm are closed, there’s not much to talk about here.
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My empathy for trans people is precisely why I find the entire phenomenon so impossible to look away from. I can find in myself some ability to reason myself into what they're claiming to be going through. I can imagine myself as a kid, not particularly popular and with plenty of angst, deciding that what is really wrong with me is my gender identity and clamping down on that idea. I am privileged to know what not doing that results in and it's a good life where I get over my angst. I fear for people who might trap themselves in a false understanding of the world that will lead them to living much worse lives than they could have led.
I know that memes are powerful enough to do this people. Memes can bend people into myrters, Jihadists, self immolators kamikaze pilots, and many other forms in service of the meme. Maybe the framing where I'm cis by default is true and they really are experiencing some extra sense that I am blind to. But I know, absolutely know, that given the right circumstances growing up I could have been made to think I was feeling that sense. I know, absolutely know, that if I had convinced myself of it I would be stubborn enough to cement it into my identity. Because of this I know that there is a boy somewhere that is going to sacrifice his health and exceptionally happy future to chase being a mere mimic of a woman. I see myself in him, I recognize that for the grace of god go I, and that breaks my heart.
I think something important to note here is the sheer volume. Especially for those who spend a lot of time online, there’s a firehouse of memes, and because of the silo effects, you simply don’t hear anything from the other side. It’s always been rather hilarious to me that the leftist response to free speech on Twitter was to leave almost immediately. And it’s rather the wrong approach to a radicalism spiral on either side. If you’re going down a black hole, the critical thing that can keep you from going too deep is seeing the other side. If I’m becoming a radical lefty, seeing conservative content and specifically memes opposed to mine will at least keep me from thinking that my Marxposting peers are in the mainstream.
The other thing is to unplug from media. Go camping and leave the phone at home. Read books, draw, paint, make warhammer figures, bake stuff, who cares. But unplugging from the firehouse is probably the best cure for radicalism.
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The meme-ness of it is the main reason I'm opposed to widespread normalization of trans minors. I've seen multiple young people (my relatives even) playing around with the idea of transitioning based on the social and online groups they were in. All of them stopped being interested in gender when separating from those groups. One push from a gender-related medical specialist and I can totally see any of them cementing gender beliefs into their identity.
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If someone showed me a study concluding that "most men are autogynephiles," I wouldn't have any difficulty believing it. I have seen several studies suggesting that a significant percentage of "straight" men find male genitalia sexually arousing. There is also quite a lot of evidence that men are extremely sexually adaptable, i.e. will have sex with anything, if necessary for release--historical accounts of homosexuality at sea or on long military campaigns contribute much to this perception, but also further edge cases like the cross-cultural recurrence of bestiality. So I'm not sure where arguments like this really get you.
I am sympathetic to "empathy" arguments. I gain nothing, personally, through cruelty to others. However "be nice" cannot possibly mean "always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society." You say:
This seems fair, but what is the actionable content of that empathy? When I see a homeless person passed out in the street, filthy, half naked, and clearly stoned out of his mind, surely the empathetic response is not, "aw, look at that guy living his best life. It's not what I would choose, but hey--different strokes for different folks!" Similarly, if I see a man wearing a dress, I'm unlikely to say anything to him about it--but if I see a man walking into a ladies' changing room, I might quite reflexively say, "Hey, do you know that's the ladies' room?" So: what should I do if I see a man in a dress walking into a ladies' changing room? Do I try to help him the way I would try to help any man making that mistake, or do I exempt him from the care I normally afford to others, to help them avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous errors?
("How do you know he's a man!?" Well, if a man in a dress really looks like a woman, then it would not occur to me to stop him from entering the ladies' room. It's true that I am not always a perfect judge of an individual's sex, but I generally do not permit my own fallibility to stop me from helping others when it seems warranted to do so, and see no reason to deviate from that policy in response to the existence of edge cases.)
I have no reason to defend moralizing busybodies who make a hobby of policing even the tiniest of deviations from the social status quo. But I think there are many reasons to, politely but firmly, refuse to go along with trans advocacy of this kind. For one thing, I suspect that for every person with serious gender dysphoria, there are at least dozens of people whose lives will be made worse by indulging trans advocacy--for example, by giving edge cases a nudge to behave in ways that will actually make their lives worse, than if they had just not. When I read that "28.5% of Gen Z women and 10.6% of Gen Z men identify as LGBTQ+," but in 1992 "3.2% of men and 1.6% of women aged 18–49 identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual," I find it very unlikely that this is the result of people being more free to behave as their "true selves." Rather, that looks to me like a serious mental health crisis born of a toxic memetic environment. That is: it looks like social contagion. How does one treat social contagion? I don't know, but I feel pretty confident that acting as if there is just nothing wrong or bad or sad or regrettable or even worth mentioning about transsexuality is the opposite of helping.
Not accidentally, your entire post could just as easily have been written about drug addicts, schizophrenics, preppers, Nickelback fans... people like what they like. Tautologically! People do what they do. I don't think there's any reason to be cruel to any of those people. I think it's a better world where we are all kind, and thoughtful, and polite, and treat others with humanity and respect. But that doesn't free us from the hard work of making value judgments, and finding ways to act on those judgments. There is a large-breasted man I see on my walks, sometimes. I have never commented on the fact that he looks like an especially tasteless parody of a woman; I'm pretty sure he knows, and I suspect it's even deliberate. There is also an anorexic woman I see on my walks, sometimes, and I don't comment on her obvious mental issues, either. But if either of them were a family member or particularly close friend--I would definitely comment, and it wouldn't be to affirm the validity or goodness of their choices.
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While trans issues are something of an obsession of mine, I usually steer clear of the whole AGP debate, partly because "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people", and partly because some sense of compassion is indeed stopping me from piling on people who are having a hard enough time going through their life, but the charge of lack of empathy is valid.
Sorry, I just can't understand it, and not for lack of trying. Like you said, empathy for gay people is easy. Love, infatuation, and sexual attraction have largely been involuntary in my experience, so it's not hard to imagine that the target of these feelings ends up being another dude, through some twist of fate.
Dysphoria? Not seeing it. The idea of discomfort at being the wrong gender is alien to me. I'm quite comfortable in my male body, and if you put me in a woman's body tomorrow, I can't think of anything deeper to say about it than "it is what it is", and moving right along.
AGP? Sorry, but your attempts to explain it name it sound even weirder than just leaving it be as an unknown:
Can't relate. That the feelings of infatuation and love end up intertwined with sexual desire is quite expected. Indeed, I'd say that is the very point for either of these feelings to lead to the other, and I'm as skeptical of "pure" infatuation as I am of raw animalistic lust, so I can't at all understand where the thought of "why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now" is coming from.
But actually you lost me right at the start, if there's anything valid to the analogy of infatuation, even the "pure" kind, that just sounds like a very advanced case of narcissism. These feelings are meant for others, not for yourself.
Like I said, far be it for me to add to your burdens, but asking that I understand where you're coming from feels like a tall order.
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Awe man. I just got off my last ban for venting a bit too hard about my fervent hatred of trans activist. You gotta get me going again?
To reign it in as best I can, no part of my problems has to do with trans people per se. Although their disfigured bodies and alien voices squick me out as badly as the worst (or best?) body horror film. But for the most part, if they can leave me alone, I can leave them alone.
But they can't leave me alone. Maybe it's less them and more the activist. I don't know. I've seen a smattering of trans people who agree all the shit going on in schools with other people's kids is pure insanity. But, they tend to not get treated well by their own "community", however much validity appeals to that fictional construct even matter.
Back to not being left alone, they're pushing the trans experience on children in public schools at incredibly young ages. Compulsory exercises at young ages forcing them to question or ponder their gender identity. Graphic pornographic material in school libraries, including elementary and middle school. Secretly socially transitioning children. Forcing penises into young girls private spaces.
The horrors they wish to subject my young daughter to fill me with a wrath and a loathing that is beyond words. At least words I'm allowed to speak here. Get them the fuck out of public schools, leave my kids alone, and they may earn back my disregard. They've forever lost my respect.
I see arguments like yours a lot, of the form "they can't leave me alone". But this seems like weird reasoning that is employed to target only policies that are already disliked. I could grant the premise of your statement, but if I did that I would also be arguing that American history fans can't leave me alone, that grammar nazis can't leave me alone, that Big Science can't leave me alone.
Simply put, public schools are institutions whose goal is to educate children. Put another way, a public school's goal is to indoctrinate children with the beliefs that are commonly accepted in the society they're a part of. You (and most other people) are not complaining that all the English majors and all the physicists can't leave your kids alone, because (presumably) you agree with the majority of them. You are targeting an ideology you already dislike and claiming it is for the reason that they are indoctrinating children; but that is what public school is all about.
Of course, there is a difference between the above and the stuff that crosses the line. To go through your examples:
I read a book by Michael Moore in which he claims that he went to an American high school and one of the students pointed out to him that all of the students were wearing neutral colours like white or pastels. Moore asked why they were doing that, and the student explained that if they came into school wearing black clothing, the principal would pull them into his office and ask them if they were planning on committing another Columbine. No idea how common this is.
Moreover, many American high schools have dress codes, and if a student is sent home from school for violating the dress code, presumably their parents are going to hear about it.
I'm assuming from the context of Columbine that this was probably a decade or two in the past when such suspicions were more common. In any case, I think this is also an overreach by the school's admin.
An explicit dress code is of course a different thing because it pertains to students following the official rules of the school, it does not at all follow the same reasoning of a teacher reporting a student to their parents for wearing different clothing that is also within the dress code or using a different name.
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Many components of gender ideology are not commonly accepted in the broader society, but educators indoctrinate children with them anyway. Because they are not commonly accepted, educators have to do this by subterfuge. Sure, they'll claim that they're only doing this because of a minority of far-right fundamentalist Christians who might kick up a stink about teachers informing children that "trans people have a right to exist", but the reality of the situation is that, while almost everyone in the West thinks that trans people should be left alone to do their own thing, the percentage of people who believe that "sex is a spectrum" or in the "genderbread person" is low, perhaps single digits.
There's also the plainly obvious fact that there's a world of difference between factual education (gravity is what pulls you down when you jump in the air; every sentence must contain a subject, a verb and an object) and normative education (it's wrong to hit your classmates). Gender ideology is objectionable at least from the former perspective, as many of its assertions are pseudoscientific woo or simply unsupported by the best available evidence ("puberty blockers are completely reversible"), and probably from the latter as well.
The percentage of people who believe that ax2 + bx + c = 0 or that Shakespeare is mandatory reading off the top of their heads is also likely in a small minority, not to mention any more obscure things which are taught in school, but we don't change the curriculum to accomodate these beliefs if Shakespeare is stil genuinely the best way to teach English or we believe the quadratic equation is important math practica.
I really don't believe the distinction between factual and normative education is as bright a line as you think it is. 'every sentence must contain a subject, a verb and an object' is a normative statement, not a factual one. If you wanted to qualify with something like 'if you want to speak correct English as recognized by such and such body' then it would become factual, but as is there is clearly a normative element to this education where we are trying to get the kids to do things the way we want them to in the same way we dont want them hitting each other.
If you are claiming that educators are teaching kids en masse that "puberty blockers are completely reversible" then sure, we could agree that's likely not factual and a bad thing to teach. I don't think this is in the curriculum broadly. Just like sexual education which teaches kids about the existence of gay/lesbian people and how they differ from straight people is not the same as encouraging kids to be gay, I think there's a way to educate kids about transgender topics which you still might classify as 'gender ideology' that is relatively neutral.
On the contrary: more than half of Americans still believe Shakespeare was "one of" the greatest playwrights of all time. That's not exactly the same question as "do you think Shakespeare should be taught in schools?" but I find it hard to imagine that only a small minority of Americans would answer "yes". Open to correction though, if you have a source.
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What would a "relatively neutral" presentation look like to you? How positive would things be posed as?
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The object level question actually matters here. English and physics usually aren't controversial, and to the extent that they are, parents are justified in complaining about them too.
Secret social transitions are a problem because social transitions are a step towards a medical transition, so parents should have some say in that process. Schools don't need to notify parents about Goth clothing because it doesn't lead to anything (except maybe a piercing? I don't know how common that is).
Evolution is controversial among creationists, yet we still teach it in public school because it is factual and leave it to private/charter schools to teach creationism. Something being controversial among a subset of the population is not inherently enough to decide it should not be taught in public school, which caters to the general public, not a subset.
I don't understand how you justify a different name and different clothing being a step towards a medical process (justifying parents being given third party info) on the one hand but being completely innocuous on the other hand when it comes to Goth/alt culture. The teachers don't have any special knowledge about what students are going to do in the future. Presumably some teachers think wearing Goth clothing leads to some things they disapprove of (Satan worship, depression, arson, whatever) but they would still be rightly reprimanded if they called home about these things. It doesn't particularly matter to me that the correlation between social transition and medical transition is likely stronger than the example I gave. Until it becomes somethng parents need to know about, it is not something parents need to know about.
If parents want to impose some special conditions under which their students are watched, that's something for private and not public school, which should cater to the general public as decided by the government's education department.
I guess I don't really see a problem with informing parents of that either.
I imagine the relevant component to you isn't the government's education department? That is, if they decided that the guideline was that parents should be informed, it seems like you'd be disappointed, not happy that they're catering to the will of the general public.
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"A different name and clothing is a step towards a medical process" is an observation about how humans behave in the real world, not a conclusion which needs to be justified. Humans don't behave that way with respect to Goth culture. If they did, then teachers should have to tell parents about that too, but they don't.
They don't have 100% certain knowledge. But they do have knowledge about what sort of things are likely and what sort of things aren't, which is enough.
Right, but it is not itself a medical process. Many people will socially transition and then not medically transition. I don't see the inherent justification for a parent to know about something which may or may not lead to a medical decision down the line, even if it's somewhat likely to. I don't want teachers having to litigate these issues among themselves or worry about whether such and such behaviour is a step towards something which needs to be reported. It is either a bright line which needs to be reported or it isn't.
If you want an easy explanation of why they should be told, I know pro-trans activism likes to talk about elevated rates of suicide among people with gender dysphoria/trans people (even though suicide is a social contagion, and we elsewhere try to avoid doing that, but whatever). Do you not think that parents should know that their child is in a group with a vastly higher suicide rate?
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We can't run the world on 100% certainty. By your reasoning, the school shouldn't report the child doing any dangerous things that didn't have a 100% chance of harming the child.
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I agree with you in principal. As a straight man, I have the same inherent revulsion you do to the thought of men having sex, but as a non-religious person, I don't think it's wrong or immoral, just something that turns me off, and lots of people have sexual practices that turn me off. If you don't make me watch/participate, it's not my business.
And I try to have the same empathy for trans people. Yes, I have a strong disgust reaction to trans women. I think they mostly look hideous and freakish, but I also think it would be wrong to judge people because they are aesthetically unappealing to me. Part of the reason I think the "They don't pass" argument from TERFs and other anti-trans people is a losing one; how "pretty" and "feminine" trans women are really isn't the point. There are actual women who are ugly and gross-looking to me, but I wouldn't be so cruel as to degrade them and call them "not women" because of their unfortunate appearance.
The problem with trans women (and to a lesser extent, a lot of LGTBQ people nowadays) is that it's not enough for them to be allowed to live their lives in peace while we politely refrain from commenting on their appearance. Many of them literally want to "shove it in our faces." See all the dissatisfaction about Pride events, which LGTBQ folks mistakenly claim is a homophobic backlash. In some cases it is - there are people who genuinely hate gays and all forms of gender non-conforming people. But I think are a lot like me; I am fine with you living your life and being happy about it, but why do I have to celebrate your sexual preferences and fetishes? Why are you looking around the room to see who stops clapping first?
I can have a lot more empathy for someone who is struggling but just wants to live their life and not be harassed and abused than I do for someone who decides that harassing and abusing other people for being insufficiently affirming is appropriate.
It's activists who have degraded our charity and tolerance. As I said in another comment, 20 years ago there were people who thought transsexuals were deviants and perverts, but they really were mostly left alone. Use the bathroom you prefer? Okay, whatever. Call yourself a woman/man, or even use weird pronouns? Okay, whatever. Some people will roll their eyes at you, but most people didn't want to make a big deal about it. Now, however, it is a big deal, always, and that makes it hard to be empathic to people who clearly are not empathetic to anyone else's reaction.
I would imagine this kind of behaviour, to the extent that it exists at all, is displayed by a vanishingly small proportion of the overall population to the point it's not worth thinking about. I live in an pretty left-liberal bubble, but unless you sought it out you would literally never be called upon to 'celebrate', or indeed make any comment at all, upon these kinds of issues.
I imagine that, like me, you don't pick unnecessary fights. For non-confrontational grillers like us, it's pretty easy to just let all the Pride stuff brush past us. Do I really care about rainbow flags everywhere and trans activists in the workplace sending out multiple emails every month about the importance of PRIDE!!!! and allyship and diversity? No, it doesn't affect me.
But... it's annoying. I notice.
More importantly, I know what the cost would be if, just once, I said something like "Why do we need yet another Pride event? Nobody is harassing you here, of all places. (And why do we need entire full-time positions just to support and affirm you?)"
I don't say things like that, because why pick an unnecessary fight? Yeah, mostly I can just ignore them. I don't have to go on their stupid Pride walks or attend their stupid Pride events or wear their stupid Pride pins or put their stupid Pride posters up at my desk.
But if I did say something like that, I'd be the office Nazi. I'd need to be educated.
Never mind that I am not "anti" LGBTQ. I want them to live their lives free of harassment. If someone was suggesting they be criminalized, or not allowed to work here, or forbidden to be public about who they are, I'd be strongly against that.
But that's not enough for them. You say no one is harassing or abusing me, and this is true, but only because I know how to keep my mouth shut and it's not important enough for me to fight over it.
If you're unfortunate enough to be someone who can't keep their mouth shut - like say, a James Damore - these are the people who will go after your job.
I will say that of the few trans people I know, personally and professionally, mostly they are pretty normal. But without exception, I have seen them go off a time or two at a relatively minor "microaggression." They definitely remind you that they are a walking social hazard zone.
When I say I resent having to keep my mouth shut, I don't mean that I really want to call someone a tranny or say "You know you're a man, right?" I'm not that big a jerk (though some of the biggest jerks among them make me want to be). I mean I resent that anything other than a nod or just benign silence when they are going off means you are now engaged in the firefight. I mean I resent that I can't say "Why yet another Pride event?" I mean I resent knowing that they expect us all to pretend and affirm and validate.
Maybe I just can't see the forest from the trees because I myself am very left-liberal and agree with the implied politics of 'pride', but this description is pretty alien to the workplaces/institutions I've been in, but as I say perhaps I just don't notice it.
I think this would meet with a negative reaction partly because people who rock the boat in this way are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as tiresome and trouble-making, in a way that doesn't really have anything to do with LGBT issues specifically. People don't like people who won't go along to get along. I appreciate it's easier to say this when what I'm going along with aligns with my politics anyway, but the politics of workplace pride is usually pretty banal. 'Unnecessary' is one thing, but I don't think a rainbow lanyard implies support for a particular regime of gender identity law, more just an interpersonal respect thing.
I think a good analogy would be some scheme or event or whatever for veterans. A lot of Western workplaces (esp. the US federal government) do have some such schemes, which I have nothing against, but even if you are virulently isolationist/anti-Western in your foreign policy views, anyone who objected to such schemes would probably find themselves written off as a tiresome bore, not because anyone cares that much about veterans but because it would make that person seem self-righteous and self-important. Such pontification implies you think other people care what you think, which probably isn't the case.
I think this illustrates the point - Damore really wasn't being personally imposed upon in any meaningful way. His objections were to firm-level hiring practices in relation to diversity. Obviously he's entitled to think they're unfair or whatever (and the mere fact of that objection doesn't seem to be why he was sacked), but on a personal level there was nothing he himself was being asked to do that might have run contrary to his beliefs. Not to say I agreed with all the backlash, much of which was a bit hysterical, but he certainly wasn't being asked to 'celebrate' anything.
All of which it to say, I don't think saying this occasions objection or even outrage just because of the literal message of the words but because one wonders why you would bother to say something like that. The social rule you'd break wouldn't be anything to do with progressive orthodoxy, but rather the general rule of 'if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing'. Clearly some people like it and find it meaningful/valuable, so good for them and anyone who doesn't can ignore it and move on with their lives. Don't people have better things to do than complain?
Given Google settled the lawsuit and the declarations made by both parties at the time, I think this is clearly wrong. He was sacked precisely for objecting in the way recommended internally. He didn't even leak his own memo.
You can't fire people for their opinion and claim they aren't "asked to celebrate anything". His was a political punishment.
I'm not denying he was sacked because of the things he said in the memo, but rather that the thing that got him sacked was very specifically his statements on women's biological disposition to neurotic behaviour, less drive to succeed etc. Which it's hard to blame them for - it would seem less than conducive to a healthy working environment to know that your colleagues consider you naturally predisposed to neurotic behaviour, by virtue of being a woman.
He could easily have made the case against any of the specific policies without that element.
I don't think you truly understand what his case was if you think this is true. He could have made a different case, one that is more compatible with the ideology of his opponents. He couldn't have made his case.
The very notion of such a standard is a indictment of the CRA in itself. That a "healthy working environment" demands suspending basic human cognition is insane.
I can understand demands that this may not be talked about in a specific context (hell I can understand banning all politics at work) but once you're asked to voice views on a particular issue connected to biology, as Damore was, the idea that certain views are simply illegal to voice because of their inherent content is clear political censorship, and unjust insofar at is has not been explicitly declared as such and only affects certain views.
This is in effect no different from similar standards that allow people to use racial epithets and rethoric at work, but only against certain races.
You can argue that one ought to know better than to criticize people who hold such a power. You can't argue that it is just that they must.
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I don't think your comparison of gender dysphoria to intense romantic infatuation is quite as illuminating as you seem to think it is.
We've all had the experience of being romantically infatuated with another person. Probably almost all of us have felt "lovesick" at one point or another, in the sense of being romantically attracted to someone who's unavailable, or being attracted to someone but being too afraid to tell them how we feel for fear of rejection, or telling someone how we feel and finding out that it's unreciprocated, or getting dumped by someone we're still very much in love with. Short of bereavement, romantic rejection is one of the most unpleasant, destabilising and humiliating emotional states that the average person is likely to find themselves in, and I would never dream of making fun of someone who's having a tough time because they got rejected by their crush or broken up with (one of the reasons "Radicalizing the Romanceless" really resonated with me). (Of all the toxic, antisocial behaviours that social media aids and abets, there are few worse than that trend when a guy texts a girl to tell her he really likes her, and she immediately screenshots the conversation and sends it to her group chat with the caption "OMG CAN YOU IMAGINE 😂😂😂".)
But some people's intense romantic fixations can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy ways which violate the boundaries of the object of their affection: repeatedly texting them, calling them or buying them gifts when they've made it perfectly clear they aren't interested; following them; bothering them in public places; sending them hateful messages; and (much more rarely, of course) physically intimidating or assaulting the object of their affection, or their current romantic partner. We call such a person a "stalker", and much of the aforementioned behaviour is actually illegal (however difficult it is to enforce), and rightfully so. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone whose affections aren't reciprocated and is feeling sad about it, my sympathy ends when they engage in unacceptable behaviour like this.
Likewise with gender dysphoria. Obviously I have no idea what gender dysphoria feels like, having never experienced it personally. But I can certainly relate to the experience of hating how your body looks in the mirror (both directly and indirectly, as I've had multiple friends who suffered from severe anorexia). I've been depressed for lengthy periods of time, and sincerely wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Much as I'd never make fun of someone who's sad because they love someone who doesn't feel the same way, I'd never make fun of someone whose gender dysphoria is causing them intense emotional distress. I am sincerely sympathetic.
But some people's gender dysphoria can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy or toxic ways: emotionally manipulating lesbians into having sex with you by accusing them of bigotry if they don't; getting lesbian speed dating events cancelled; suing women who refuse to wax your male genitalia; sending rape and death threats to a female victim of sexual assault who expressed discomfort about using a bathroom alongside trans women; physically assaulting a gender-critical woman in her sixties; shooting up a primary school and so on. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone suffering from gender dysphoria, my sympathy vanishes the instant they engage in behaviour like this.
So I think I'm actually being perfectly consistent, per the terms of your analogy.
I'm open to correction on this and fully admit I may be falling victim to confirmation bias or the availability heuristic, but my impression from this community is that, when trans issues come up, it's usually not so much people complaining about the former (i.e. "this person has gender dysphoria, gross, what a disgusting fetishist") and more people complaining about the latter (i.e. "this person is suffering from gender dysphoria, which is leading them to engage in behaviours which would be grossly unacceptable if carried out by anyone"). And I admit there's a bit of Chinese-robbering going on, wherein people highlight bad behaviour by self-identified trans people which obviously bears no causal relationship to their gender dysphoria as a means of casting aspersions on the whole group, which I'm not cool with for the same reason I'm not cool with any use of the Chinese robber fallacy.
I am a reactionary on this one: I think the stigmatisation of deep love and persistent suitors is something modern society has gotten badly wrong, and is a symptom of safetyism and inauthenticity. Threats and physical attacks of course have to be off-limits (though even then, there used to be far more sympathy than there is now; note that Romeo and Paris literally fight a duel to the death over Juliet, and neither's intended as an unsympathetic character), but most of the other stuff you mention in many cases is a non-issue blown up by hysterical fear and in other cases is a mild annoyance that can be trivially dealt with by blocking the stalker's number.
To clarify, I'm not saying that obsessively texting or calling someone should be illegal, and it's rarely more than an annoyance for the person at the receiving end. But I also think that pestering or bothering someone is bad behaviour, and that when the object of your affection has made it perfectly clear they aren't interested, you should respect that. I'd put on the same level as ghosting someone: obviously not calling for it to be banned or made a criminal offense (how could it?), but I consider it inconsiderate and disrespectful unless proven otherwise.
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I can have sympathy for all sinners. All are tempted by sin. None of us has lived a perfect life. Yet we are commanded to turn away from sin and repent, while bearing our burdens.
Unrepentant sinners can be treated as pagans or tax collectors. If I'm not expected to have fellowship them why would I be expected to endorse a social or cultural belief that this behavior is fine. Where we will not be heard, we should shake of the dust and move on, our pearls are not for swine. We should not give what is holy to
dogsthe unrepentant dressed as dogs or cartoon animals as part of degenerate sexual role play.The idolatry and love of sin is the problem, not lack of empathy.
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In my limited experience their personalities seem to not just be male, but hyper male. Like take for instance the prevalence of trannies in the speedrunning community, it is hard to think of a more hypermasculine activity than speedrunning. I don't mean masculine in some spiritual sense of idealized masculinity (masculinity of war, hunting, bravery, leadership etc) but in the empirical sense of percentage of partakers in the activity. The motte is similarly hypermasculine, so it doesn't surprise me we have a few AGP types such as yourself around here. But why do you think this is? Are you generally hypermasculine in your other interests and thought patterns?
I have always suspected that I am in the "at-risk for AGP" demographic, even though I've never felt it myself. I imagine that some AI classifier, upon taking stock of my job, my hobbies and even my writing style would probably say that I am male with the an unimaginably high degree of certainty. Job in software (probably 90% male), enjoys Paradox games (probably 99% male), main hobby is a collecting hobby (probably 90% male), participates on The Motte (probably 99% male)...I imagine these things are even more heavily male coded than things that stereotypically come to mind like UFC, hunting, Joe Rogan etc.
It's ultra nerdy male. There's jockish spaces, normie spaces, etc that are just as male.
Most women hunters are not actually shooting. They're allowing their husbands/fathers/whatever to use their tags. This as participation in the sport is... debatable.
Not so sure about that -- I know three couples like this, and in all cases the women are right there on the trigger.
Only one that will go out on her own though (not a tranny, but possibly naturally a bit high-T), so maybe switch it to 'hunts alone'?
It's possible this is a regional thing. But my experience with hunting camp is that wives and daughters might be hanging around, and might be claiming to be shooting, but they're really just there to get their husband or father a bigger bag limit- and will happily take credit for shooting something to outsiders, even trusted ones, for that purpose.
I could see that happening, but yeah, out west we don't do the 'hunt camp' thing as much -- or if we do it's in addition to 'go sit in a good spot (and/or cruise some cutblocks in the truck) for a few hours before/after work'. Nice to have some company for this, but it's also nice to be alone in the woods sometimes.
To be clear the people I'm talking about are ones that I hunt with personally and have observed shooting deer, so you can take that observation with whatever credibility you associate with internet randos (ie. me) -- the one girl who does go by herself is not quite as keen as her husband, but will take a couple horses out for a week ~once a year and come back with meat, so I'm pretty confident she's not secretly meeting up with her husband afterwards to throw his deer in the truck. (although in this case it would also not surprise me in the least if they also engaged in legally ambiguous activities in the event that all the tags aren't filled at the end of the season)
Ah, out west. Texas's hunting culture is an extension of the greater south, whereas the west's is not, so the regional distinction is probably the dominant factor here.
Yeah in some ways it's just that hunting is way easier here -- Easterners talk about hunt camps, deer drives, tree stands and I'm like WTF dude, just go drive around at sunrise +/- a couple of hours.
Doesn't really explain the gender difference though -- women I know (and these are in some cases literal partners in crime growing up; no way they are making up stories about shooting moose to impress me) are solidly either 'why can't you just leave the animals alone' or pretty bloodthirsty themselves -- the middle ground is not there. Cultural I guess.
I think a bunch of this is climate, as well- in the south it’s still too warm to hang deer in November, you have to pack the body cavity with ice, or quarter it in an ice chest, which means you need a freezer to store that ice, which means you need a deer camp with electricity. + there’s less public land, you need to secure permission to hunt on someone’s private land. Militates in favor of hunt camps, and since it’s usually private land with restricted access, there’s no free rider problem to setting up feeders and tree stands.
Deer stalking is a different sport which is more common on public land- heavier forest cover makes the Rockies-style ‘drive around on public land until you see an elk’ a way to not see any game.
The gender difference I’m reasonably sure is cultural, though. AFAIK the intermountain west and northern Rockies aren’t much less socially conservative than the south, so it seems kind of random.
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I have an acquaintance who came out as a trans woman a few years ago, and the irony of her situation has not escaped my attention. She claims to be a woman trapped in an "assigned male at birth" body, and yet the number of cis women I know personally who
are zero, zero, zero and zero, respectively. Likewise the recent micro-scene of bedroom black metal solo projects whose members identify as trans women (most famously Liturgy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(band)], but it seems every other band on this label meets that description exactly): does anything scream "socially awkward man with some autistic traits" more than starting a bedroom black metal solo project?
What you're describing is autistic traits, and many feminists have argued that autism is "extreme masculinity" (men tend to be high-systematising, and autistic men are almost totally systematising). I'm sure you're already aware that the correlation between autism and gender dysphoria is extremely strong and seems to becoming stronger with every year.
I'm a man who several people have independently suggested might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, high-systematising, bookish, socially awkward, didn't fit in at school (as a result of which I retreated into social media and anonymous online chatrooms), love video games enough to have done a master's in game design, listened to black metal obsessively as a teenager, passively interested in anime and manga as a teenager. If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now. (At least then my enormous ass would have been more of an asset in my dating life.) By the same token, had my aforementioned acquaintance been born five or ten years earlier, I think the chances of them coming out as trans at the age they did would have been somewhere around nil. Anyone who thinks social contagion plays no role in this phenomenon must be blind.
I think you're right that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with it. I remember at the nadir of my dating life (before Obergefell) looking in the mirror and asking why I couldn't find an awesome woman. And at least very briefly thinking that I'd be a good one myself (fit, tall, all those cool male-coded interests: what's not to like?). But it wasn't a popular idea to consider at the time, so it got shoved aside never to return and things got better for me within a few weeks. I'm occasionally thankful it didn't get further consideration at the time.
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I know this feeling too. At the end of high school, around 2008 I had a friend confide in me his feelings of gender dysphoria (although he didn't word it that way, being before the whole transgender trend) thinking I shared them. Of course I didn't, but he must have taken my autistic personality traits to signal it. I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
And this is specifically autistic, though. Your plumber dissatisfied with his love life hits the strip club instead.
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It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
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Right. But shouldn't we take special note of this distinction? When you look at this personality type that's "at risk" for AGP - nerds, aspies, autists, whatever you want to call it - isn't there something about it that's "in between" masculine and feminine? (Appropriate, given the topic at hand). In one sense you are correct that it's "hyper male" just in terms of sheer statistics. But at the same time, these men tend to display traits that are decidedly unmasculine - higher in neuroticism, more emotional in general, higher verbal ability, less physically aggressive, often averse to traditionally masculine interests like (physical) sports, etc.
My understanding of aspies is basically that they have to learn to be social explicitly, they have to kind of learn that something is a joke and that you laugh after a joke, etc. it’s completely external like a skill. And I think that since our vision of our identity or identities is seen through the other, the aspies have a bit less self-awareness of their identities than a normie might. You don’t just naturally act like your gender as most people do by picking up on cues, you learn to act your gender the way I might learn French — you make an explicit decision to study the subject, and then to use it. Of course it’s never going to feel quite natural in the same way my French isn’t going to feel natural— it’s something I’m translating in my head from my natural language to French and it’s not the same as English which I just naturally speak without having to think about it.
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You're correct that aspies, nerds or whatever tend to display more feminine traits. In terms of their interests, I would argue they're "hypermale" not just in terms of statistics but also in terms of their character. Men tend to be high-systematisers and interested in abstract systems, while women are more interested in interpersonal relationships. "Intensely interested in abstract systems but utterly lacking in social skills" is about as pithy a definition of "nerd" as you can get, whereas more typically "bro" males tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: they'll have a passing interest in abstract systems (e.g. have memorised Nomar Garciappara's on-base percentage or the acceleration on a '67 Ford Mustang), but without sacrificing the ability to "read the room" and charm people. Most of the stereotypically nerdy interests (systems-heavy video games; hard sci-fi; fantasy universes with elaborate magic systems, conlangs and extensive worldbuilding; electrical engineering; tabletop gaming; computer programming; progressive/technical death metal; IDM; math rock) are about complex abstract systems first and human beings/interpersonal relationships a distant second, if at all. Even saying "nerds like video games" doesn't really sell the distinction I'm getting at: plenty of ordinary dudes will play a little Call of Duty to unwind in the evening, but it takes a certain kind of nerd to log thousands of hours in high-level grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive or learn the entire metagame for Starcraft II. The reason nerds don't have much of an interest in team sports isn't because they're more interested in traditionally feminine interests, but the same reason they don't like playing Call of Duty: they find these activities mechanically shallow and uninteresting from a systems perspective, and are usually not shy about expressing their contempt for the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who do derive enjoyment from these activities (the latter clause is "in character" and not what I personally believe, in case it wasn't obvious). Show me a nerdy dude or trans woman who's into knitting, astrology and murder podcasts, and then we can talk about how feminine their interests are.
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Tried that. They turned tail on me, defined me and mine and disgusting, and started persecuting in earnest. That's a large part of the culture war.
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And enforce rules he or she does not like anyway even if they occur at their expense, correct?
'Empathy' is not an exception to social regulation. It may be used to claim it, or demand it, or insist that it should, but the fundamental purpose of government is to tell people 'no' and enforce that objection by force if necessary. This includes, and is especially true, for demands by one on the part of others- be it life (no, they do not have to give you their lives), property (no, they do not have to give you their possessions), conscience (no, they do not have to follow your religion), or presence (no, they do not have to let you into their personal spaces).
It is precisely because the government is in the business of allocating resources and punishments that governments are ethically obliged to not do so on the basis of empathy. Empathy is, after all, easiest for those we already care about and in scarce supply for our rivals or opponents. Empathy is, additionally, easy to fake and yet hard to measure- there are any number of performative appeals to empathy, but few metrics to actually identify those who need it (often because they cannot speak for themselves). A society ruled by empathy is an often cruel place, as it is one which takes from those less emapthizable with and gives to those who are most successful in bullying social pressure to claim the profits for themselves.
This is why virtuous governments are ruled by laws, not empathy. Empathy may be a consideration in the laws a just society creates, but only in accordance with any other virtue or favor, and refusing to enforce socially validated laws in the name of empathy for a select groups is a lack of empathy for other groups.
This is the purpose of government under liberalism. You can totally have ‘different people live under different laws and there’s complex rules about who defers to whom’, and have a state, as long as it’s not a liberal society.
I don’t think trans realize that.
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Indeed. To take an easy case, I have to constantly admonish secular people have to such empathy and magnanimity towards religious people. Many secular people consider religious folk mentally diseased and morally defective. This is not meant to be insulting. I just take ethics seriously. It would be easy for me decide that all religious people are intellectually and morally deranged; a lost cause. They routinely claim certainty about something I know they are not certain. Almost always they were indoctrinated about what to believe, and then not to question it. Case closed, right?
But that's not the whole story. I know that religion does so much good for so many people. I know what spiritual yearning and salvation feels like. Order. Comfort. Community. Humility that this world is much bigger than we can even begin to understand. To realize that the purpose life - no matter who is controlling it - is to love whoever is around to be loved. To realize that one friend is all one needs in order to be well supplied with friendship. Imaginary friends should count, too.
So yeah, I think being religious means something is mentally wrong with you. But don't let what I have written tell on me. I - the author of this post - actually, sincerely, earnestly, unsarcastically and unironically, have empathy for religious people.
But this isn't about religion.
This is about empathy. Not pity. Not sympathy. And certainly not about condoning actions one finds immoral. Empathy isn't best derived from an analogous personal experience. Thoughts can overcome emotion. As a straight guy, I too find depictions of men blowing and butt fucking one another to be inherently gross. According to John Haidt, this is fairly normal as when some straight men are show such images, areas in brain related to disgust become active. However, I have the analogous feelings of love and lust to fall back on. When a gay person says "I want that too" my emotions are easily overcome. When it comes to trans related issues I'm more at a loss. I have hated myself in one way or another, but never in a way that altering my outward appearance would be useful. I'm quite open to experience, so when a trans person tells me they want to be trans on their own time, I have to felt sense or moral or ethical implication, and am willing to make reasonable accommodations in kind. However, when trans activists make a religion out of woke, I can delineate what and is or is not a reasonable accommodation in kind. Importantly, I can still have empathy for the terminally woke. It probably is genuinely distressing to think the Cass Report is bigoted pseudoscience, or that there is some sort of trans genocide, as is often hysterically claimed. Empathy has a role to play in destroying bad ideas.
For what it's worth, from the perspective of someone who's very religious, the worst and most frustrating attitude I've ever run into from non-religious people is the idea that because religion is "a choice" it must always come second to other identities. A gay person (supposedly) can't choose not to be gay, but a Christian can choose not to be Christian, or can choose not to be an anti-gay Christian, so gay identity comes first.
But that's not how any serious follower of any religion I've ever spoken to experiences their religion, and it's certainly not how I experience it. I'm not just choosing this or that on the basis of arbitrary preference, such that I could change my mind. Faith is not like picking which car to drive. I'm practicing a particular religion because it's actually true. Telling me "well, you could just choose not to be Christian" feels like, ironically, someone telling a scientist, "well, you could just choose not to be Darwinist, look, Lysenkoism is a perfectly good choice, why not believe that?"
The atheist who thinks that I'm wrong and my beliefs are false is, to my mind at least, better and more tolerable than the atheist who thinks that my beliefs are mere affectation or aesthetic preference. No, I can't just believe something else, because that would be switching from something true to something false. If you want me to change my beliefs, you have to actually convince me that my beliefs are false. There is no shortcut.
And for what it's worth from an Atheist, I've only ever seen this attitude get applied towards Christians, not towards the religious in general. Opposing e.g. Islamophobia has the baked-in assumption that Muslims can't simply choose to not be Muslim to avoid discrimination. But when it comes to discriminating against 'fundies' there's no such consideration.
I've seen the point made that this could also be due simply to Islamists being more than willing to kill for insults to their faith, like the Charlie Hebdo incident. Christians, especially today, have a more "turn the other cheek" attitude, and aren't so willing even to criticize blasphemy, much less to kill for it.
If true, that's rather scary: it suggests that the only way to ensure tolerance of a belief system is to be uncompromising and violent in defense of it, because any weakness will be exploited even by people who consider themselves paragons of 'tolerance.'
I realize that sounds like a "Just Asking Questions" moment where I'm suggesting the opposite to justify something terrible, but I have a genuine fear that this is true and would consider it horrifying if it were. I would much rather we all get along, and I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.
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Yes, with Islam specifically I think the implied belief is that 'Muslim' is basically an ethnicity or a race. This is silly, especially because Islam is very resolutely and explicitly non-racial and non-ethnic, but no one accused Western political discourse of making sense.
I mean, scientologists are mostly white, and everyone thinks they're stupid and delusional.
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As is so often the case, it comes down to the outgroup/fargroup distinction. For leftist in America, Muslims (even the ones in the country) are the fargroup. They just don't care about them that much. But Christians (especially the conservative, fundamentalist strain of Christian) are the outgroup. They hate those people, and so they target all their ire at them.
If Muslims were making laws aimed at me, I'd care more about what they do.
Most people don't care about others' personal beliefs, as long as they don't affect people who don't believe the same things.
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Muslims are definitely not fargroup in the UK yet this pattern still holds.
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This is fascinating. I would have remained blind to it otherwise, so thanks. I wonder how many other religious people feel this way. I have learned to put conscious effort into empathizing with people taking their religion as literally true. It explains so much, and has changed me for the better. However, I never considered that religious beliefs themselves would be, seem, feel, etc. like they were not a conscious choice.
For example, I prefer exclusively women over men when it comes to having sex. No argument exists which could convince me to sexually prefer men (any more than there is a convincing argument that I prefer eating poo over ice-cream). I'm just not wired to prefer those things. However, I could be convinced to become a Christian or Muslim or Flat Earther or 9/11 truther, or whatever. My non-theism remains a choice. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something or this is all semantics, hinging on free will or something.
Are deeply held religious beliefs experienced the same way as be deeply held beliefs like murdering random people is wrong, or the Sun is driven by fusion, or the govt shouldn't tax unrealized gains, or the US is a great country, etc. How are religious beliefs experienced differently?
I find it interesting that you put flat earth in a different category than a fusion-powered sun.
Anyway, I think there are clearly at least some voluntary components to religions, which are plainly choices. Religious people do also talk about having struggling with doubts.
But yeah, Christians do literally think that God died and was resurrected 2000 years ago. Doesn't mean that that's always going to be fully internalized, of course, but we do think that. If you asked a Christian "Was there someone 2000 years ago named Jesus, who was crucified?" "Did Jesus rise from the dead?" "Was Jesus God?" I think you'll generally get some pretty sincere yeses, especially if you ask the questions in that order.
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I don't want to get too deeply into my own experiences, but I doubt that I'm completely unique, and in cases like mine, it doesn't feel like a choice, but rather like a grudging admission of something that I could no longer deny. It usually doesn't feel like deciding to believe in God, but often the opposite, as if one tried to decide not to believe in God, but after long trial and effort it proved impossible.
Perhaps the most famous example of a Christian like this would be C. S. Lewis. From Surprised by Joy, ch. 14:
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A chaplain I knew once credited it as to experience the sublime in a way that changes your perspective afterwards on the world.
'Sublime' is a word that's often used as just another synonym for quality in art, but it can mean more than just 'pretty.' Something sublime is something that strikes one with awe- not simply being impressed, but the much more intense feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. Once you experience it, you are forever changed, because while your feeling on the thing may change afterwards, the reverence / respect / fear / wonder changes how you see the relation of things.
This is not, to be clear, a 'solely' religious experience. It's a somewhat common attestation of astronauts who go into space and look down on the earth- seeing how small their home countries are puts the their formerly massive worlds into a new perspective. Astronauts, despite coming from often committed career professional paths of government cultures, often have a reputation for being more post-nationalist/more internationalist, not because they don't care about their countries but because their paradigm is shifted by the scale perception and how they view their homelands. That sense of being taken out of your previous perception paradigm and thrust into another has other analogs as well, often when dealing with items of scale- some people get put into awe by nature, or by mega-engineering, or by diving deep into conceptually massive items.
The point here isn't 'what' causes your perception shift, but rather that you have one, and what that means going forward. Just as an astronaut is never going to look at earth the same way again even when they return, or an environmentalist struck by the grandeur of nature will never be as impressed by industrial output, the very way people connect the world together has changed in a way that is not 'merely' a choice.
You do not choose to undergo the sublime experience (you can go look at something other people say is sublime and feel nothing), but likewise when you do experience the sublime you do not 'choose' to let it change you- instead, you are the one changed, because that is part of what strikes the reverence / respect / fear. And after that sort of experience, well... you can try to argue with a converted environmentalist that industrialization is good, and they might be swayed by specific arguments that industrialization may be a net positive for society despite it's harm to nature, but the underlying paradigms of how they put the world together has changed. You can't really argue people out of that any more than you can argue them out of their own visual perception.
Religion is a broad set of dynamics and relations, but the sublime religious experience is broad enough / shared enough that people who have experienced it can find enough of each other to validate and further the beliefs, in a similar sense that you and I both know what 'love' is as an experience despite not knowing eachother or eachother's experiences. For those touched by the sublime, something similar exists, and through it the sense of solidarity that the sublime experience, rather than being purely personal, is a shared sense of something else- and that something else is God, with all the fear / wonder / awe / reverence that implies.
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Can you?
Because the actual answer to how hard it is, is "not at all, actually". This is way, way more projection than anything any of us actually feel -- save those who have been bullied and belittled into thinking they should feel that way. But as someone who has been anti-religious since early primary school it has not been difficult in the slightest to deal with. If anything, seeing the state of women in 2024, I feel lucky. Blessed, even.
Anyway, I don't think the reason most ordinary people take against trans is disgust in any case. I think it's the entitlement.
99.9% of the population are supposed to change their manner of speaking and the rules for this 0.1%, who aren't ever even grateful for any kind of effort, but just make more and more demands once any inches are given. If you do not believe a man can become a woman, an incredibly common belief, you are supposed to never ever voice this belief, and indeed act and speak contrary to it at all times, because it is your responsibility, your duty, to reinforce these people's identities at all times. But they'll still fucking despise you despite it.
And don't you dare try to exclude them from your dating pool, even if they have the wrong genitals! That's -phobic, makes you a "genital fetishist" and "not really gay, since you only like dick and not men" and that means they get to call for your death on public social media and that's justified and totally fine. Bigot!
Nah. Fuck 'em.
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Genuine empathy cannot be compelled. And to the extent that it could be, it would have no value. We should encourage understanding; that is, a rational understanding of the physical and social causes that make people think as they think and do as they do. But such understanding is distinct from empathy and compassion as emotional affects.
What I find most obnoxious about the contemporary transsexual "movement" is that they have legislated, by social fiat, a prescribed position on a philosophical question that rightly should be a matter of free inquiry and debate: namely, the metaphysics and ontology of gender. This really grinds my gears like nothing else. Possibly more than anything having to do with bathrooms or puberty blockers. The right to open inquiry is one of the closest things I have to a sacred value. When you are forced to refer to an MTF transsexual as "she", you are being compelled, under social duress, to assert as an ontological truth that this person just is a woman (and all parties are aware that that's plainly what's going on here - otherwise it wouldn't be such a heated topic of disagreement in the first place). I can't accept being compelled to assent to such a contentious position.
For my part, the two positions on the ontology of gender that I take seriously are the conservative position - that there are such things as men and women, and the way we usually sorted people into those buckets up until ~40 years ago is basically correct - or the eliminativist position - that no person is either a man or a woman, and thus "X is a woman" is vacuously false for all X. On either position, to say that an MTF transsexual "is a woman" is to utter a falsehood, and thus I do not believe that such a statement should be socially compulsory. There have been serious attempts to develop an ontology that would support the transsexual position, and I treat them with the same respect that I give by default to all positions that I disagree with, but I don't personally consider any such view to be a live possibility.
Compassion isn't a social affect: it's an act of the will.
When I suggested to you that compassion is better than understanding, my point was not that you need to get all teary-eyed and emotional about everyone's problems, though I won't knock that. My point is that it's far greater and more important to earnestly will and desire the best for everyone. That doesn't mean being emotional about it, and it certainly doesn't mean affirming the desires of every single person, especially when they go against their best interests. It can often mean telling people to their face that the path they're on ends up in disaster and they need to stop, now. "Admonishing the sinner" is considered a work of mercy very much for that reason.
But it certainly means caring about what happens to people, even if only abstractly. It means seeing the bad places and needless suffering that people end up in, and earnestly wishing that it were not so. It even includes taking steps to prevent bad outcomes, if only in a very small way.
Understanding can help, insofar as it can help you see where people have ended up with the needs that they have. But it's more important simply to wish for the best, even if you don't fully understand what that looks like, even if the only thing you can muster is the earnest desire that all should end well.
If I understand @dovetailing and @SubstantialFrivolity correctly when they talk about empathy and compassion, I think this is what they're saying. The antonym isn't emotional impassivity, but malice. Dovetailing is arguing that what people often feel towards trans people is malice: "the cruelty is the point."
This makes it sound like something you can arbitrarily turn on or off "at will", which can't be right. But it also can't be right to say that it's entirely outside of your control either.
I suppose I would say it's something like an "unchosen choice".
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When I said I try to treat trans people with compassion, I meant the more pedestrian sense. I know that for such a person some things are going to be upsetting (for example, if I insist on bringing up that he is really a man and not a woman as he claims). Since I would have neither the desire to upset him nor the belief that it would profit either of us to have the discussion, I'm going to defer it as much as possible.
I have been pondering over the past few months how I, a Christian, should act towards transgender people I encounter (not that I do so that often). Mainly because the answer a lot of people give is some variation of "speak the truth in love", but I have noticed for many that is really more of a post hoc rationalization to justify what they wanted to do anyway (to tell the trans people off). I don't want to fall into that same trap, and I know my human nature makes me prone to it as well, so I have tried to think of how to address the situation. If these people are sinning (which many would argue they are), I have a duty to gently point it out. It also seems to me that I have a duty to stick to the truth and not affirm falsehoods just to be polite. But at the same time, I also have a duty to show kindness towards them (even more so because they often are people who already feel like social outcasts and who have serious emotional and mental health difficulties).
My attempt to square this circle is more or less what I said in my other post - I'm not going to preemptively bring up the topic, but if forced I won't lie either. And, if I think that the time is right (i.e. it won't push them even further away), I might even gently point out that their path isn't what God wants for them.
This is basically similar to the approach I take with gay people I encounter in life. I don't (generally) tell them that their lifestyle is sinful, because in American society it's almost impossible for them to not know that. If I were to make that the point I emphasize, most likely I'm just going to push them further away from the church and from God. So instead, I hang out with them like I would any other person. Comfort them when they are down, celebrate when they are up, etc. And I pray for the wisdom to recognize if there ever is a right moment to say "hey man, I just don't think it's a good idea to live this lifestyle that the Bible is very clear is sinful", that I'll recognize it when it comes. Maybe that's a coward's way, IDK. But it's the best I can do for right now, anyways.
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Since my first exposure to it via /tumblrinaction more than a decade ago it's been TRA's persistence in presenting contradictory, circular and otherwise faulty reasoning as their basis for justification that frustrates me more than any idea of a man in a dress winning a sports match against women and then using the same changing room after the contest, or similar object level conflicts.
I'd be just as vexed if people made serious arguments that magic is real and that if you ruminate on it long enough your wish to learn magic can come true by forcing everyone to call your school Hogwarts, changing your name to Harry Potter and cutting a lightning scar into your head. Legislating for Hogwarts accreditation and arguing whether Griffindors are allowed in Hufflepuff dormitories is redundant.
What's crazy is that rather than getting laughed off the internet the tumblrites successfully coerced the real world into entertaining their fantasy by little more than using the threat of being shamed for intolerance on social media.
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This is the crux of my objection as well. I have issues with the idea of taking a healthy human and mutilating their body to make them a crude facsimile of the other sex, but at the end of the day I think adults have the right to choose self-mutilation if that's what they want. But what I will not play ball with is the attempt to try to get me to affirm a lie (that a trans person really is the sex they claim to be) as the truth.
I try to treat trans people I encounter with respect and compassion; they are my brothers and sisters just like everyone else. And Lord knows that they have enough on their plates without me disrespecting them. But "respect and compassion" does not include telling bold faced lies just because that is what they want to hear. I'll avoid the topic of gender as much as possible for their sake, but if it's unavoidable then I'm not going to lie about it.
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I don't necessarily feel disgusted. If I were forced by Society or the State to interact with a (certain kind of) trans woman in a female only space, I would probably feel threatened. The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening. Trans women in contact sports or women's shelters seems potential threatening, on a case by case basis. I am basically fine with people using their intuition/gut/systems that are below the threshold of rationality to make decisions about things like "does this person feel threatening?" I think that we are wrong to try to squash that in the name of disparate impact.
Sex segregated spaces are usually a good thing. To the extent that we, as a society, have gotten rid of male spaces, that was mostly a bad idea and we should bring most of them back. To the extent that we are now in the process of getting rid of certain female only spaces by admitting trans women who the other women don't necessarily accept without coercion, that is also a bad thing. I think it is very reasonable to admit some trans women to some female spaces on the basis of vibes with the women, and not other trans women to other spaces, on the basis of things like large, strong, and has a penis. We've gone crazy and extra on marginal equity lately, which is a bad thing.
Yes, but you're not male. Gays/transgenders larping as women come off as a bit gross to straight men, the sort of person who'd make you want to wash your hands after shaking theirs, but not scary.
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"The new trans woman in Congress who was making video threats about bashing their female colleagues head in the bathroom seemed very threatening"
This is a wild claim to make offhand without a source. Surely if this happened it would be all over the news (at least the conservative outlets). And yet I can find nothing! Unless you were referring to threats left over the phone by anonymous people, in which case again you are making a wild leap in logic to assume that it is the new Congresswoman. Open to being proved wrong if you actually have a source.
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Do you have a source for this?
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I'd heard that there had been threats, but not threats by a member of congress.
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But emotions can be flawed and often are.
If I see a stereotypical homeless schizophrenic person raving in the street, I definitely "feel" for them, but I'm not about to indulge their delusions of being Jesus Christ.
The thing that's never made sense to me about Trans ideology is that it seems to be firmly planted in the feeling and emotional camp for justification. If you really, truly feel you are the wrong gender, then, apparently, transition is a remedy for that. But there are thousands of people who, daily, really, truly feel that they are depressed, angry, lonely ... and still thousands more who deeply feel they are Jesus Christ. For this later group, we identify that that doesn't meet with reality and, therefore, that dissonance is a disease (or illness, whatever the preferred nomenclature is) and we ought to help that person through it (to the extent that they are capable. There's another thread in here about forced institutionalization, but let's stay focused). I would assume that any psychiatrist who has a patient who swears up and down that they are Napoleon reborn, and then offers that patient a prescription for Fancy French uniforms, they would be rightfully stripped of their professional license.
I have no problem with the idea of men or women wanting to dress, act, "present" as the other gender. If this provides joy and happiness in your life, that's wonderful. But the forced Kafabe of reality is a problem because society should never prioritize emotional comfort over truth (for adults ... we get to play a little fast and loose when raising children as they have to be taught emotional maturity gradually). The word games around "sex" versus "gender" don't make any meaningful distinction and only serve as a way to force conformity and create lines of demarcation for in-group and out-group.
Mostly, I think the trans issue is the same as the left-handed gun owners issue - there isn't one. For an vanishingly small percent of the population, they have severe mental and emotional issues that may or may not be alleviated through medical intervention. Many more are simply gay or lesbian folks reconciling with themselves. Some have generalized self-image issues. For example:
Sorry to lightly edit your own words, but I think you can see how reading this could make someone think that it isn't about male-female, but more generally about self-conception/self-image acceptance. You could sub in some words about "fat" vs "skinny" and the sentences and ideas would still be coherent.
But the Trans-Ideology cult are none of those people and, instead, have taken up that cause as a political cudgel. Agreement with the ideology is far, far more important than empathy to the actual humans. Both of these are far, far less important than an accurate relationship with reality and the Truth.
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I am much more hostile to trans than I am to gay, and more than I used to be. I wouldn't say I don't care if someone is trans or not, I will judge them and wouldn't want to hang out, but I am not here to police every dumb thing people do. So then I should be in favor of trans people being left alone right? I guess, but only if they will agree to leave me alone, and they certainly have not.
Demanding that society redefine gender to suit them even though it flies in the face of objective reality, trying to get men into women's only spaces, and otherwise trying to force everyone else to join them in their delusions is a hostile act, and I return it with hostility. If they want to be left alone and treated with anything other than hostility I say they can go first.
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I have a lot of sympathy for the heavily gender dysphoric: their existence seems to be very painful, and the apparent best treatment currently avaiable to them, gender transition hard and early, cannot be reasonable healthcare policy with today's screening methods: You're going to ruin the life of many a confused child (or the children of histrionic psychos).
The problem is that their plight gets used as a cover for a bunch of perverts, fetishists, political actors and other assortments of malcontents. As such, trans-acceptance discourse is not properly framed as what it might be: an act of kindness, for which boundaries need to be set, and in which some people who are suffering are not going to get everything they want.
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