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Notes -
Hi guys! Have you heard about the Eunuch Archive?
The Eunuch Archive is a friendly support site for the Eunuch Community. Originally a part of the Body Modification E-Zine (with the tagline "the fetish is reality"), since the late 90's they've been hosting erotic fiction by and for people with a kink for being castrated.
Can't say I read a lot of these stories, but going through the titles there seems to be a some amount of "wife gets back at husband", or "help, I've been sold into sex slavery". One theme that stood out was the idea of castration being normalized in the future. For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?", describing the procedure, and praising it's health benefits. The punchline comes at the end (keep in mind the story was written in 2002):
There also many stories that are far more disturbing, or as they put it themselves:
The summary for one states:
Yikes... you can't say they didn't warn you.
Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH?
WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health. It is often cited in academic literature, and invites the world's top experts in the field to write the standards of care for transgender people.
Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.
Well, I suppose I can't criticize what people do off the clock. Ok, so maybe their academic research was actually still on the clock, but isn't the whole point of academia to explore and document all, even the weirdest corners of society? If they can combine their work with their hobby, all I can say is: good for them!
As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.
Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH's latest Standard of Care?
As mentioned above the SOC is a set of guidelines developed by the WPATH with the goal to "provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transgender and gender diverse people with safe and effective pathways to achieve lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, and to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment".
This latest version has been the subject of some controversy. For example, the previous version contained "suggested minimum ages" for a number of procedures, like:
14+ years old for cross-sex hormones
15+ years old for double mastectomies
16+ years old for breast implants, facial feminisation surgery
17+ years old for metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, fronto-orbital remodelling
18+ years old for phalloplasty.
In the latest version the only one that remains is the limit on phalloplasty. In another controversial decision, they decided that children can move straight to cross-sex hormones – they will no longer be requested to start with a suppression of puberty. Perhaps most controversially, the latest Standards of Care now includes an entire chapter on eunuchs, and proposes a new "eunuch-identity":
Well, I suppose it could be a coincidence. I mean just because they suddenly came up with a eunuch-identity, doesn't mean they got it from the regulars of the fetish webs-...
...
Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚
This reminded me of... this story. But here, author does make it clear that she'd really like it to happen. (especially in the comment section)
From "Author's note":
And it's not just this story.
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I think the biggest takeaway here is exactly how little evidence is required for WPATH to declare something a "gender identity" requiring "medically necessary gender-affirming care". I've read academic papers from forum posters talking about their forum buddies before, but I've certainly never seen a case where the resulting paper was considered notable, let alone sufficient basis to create a medical standard of care. I previously wrote a post about otherkin/transracialism/plurals as a control-group for gender-identity, in the same way that parapsychology can serve as a control group for science. This serves a similar function, but on the medical institution side of things.
Also, take a moment and consider exactly how big the gap is between the quality of evidence and the boldness of the claim. Presumably the author thinks gender identities are fixed/inborn:
So apparently for all of human history some people have been born with a eunuch gender identity (separate from actual eunuchs who generally had no choice), and we're only now finding out thanks to the guys writing the WPATH standard of care happening to post on a related fetish forum. And that's just it as a scientific claim, but this isn't even about whether a hypothesis has a 51% chance of being true, it's about medical care. Medical care carrying severe and permanent side-effects demands use of the precautionary principle and very strong evidence that it will benefit the patient. But it goes beyond even that because of course this isn't him treating a specific patient he has met, it's him establishing a medical standard of care. His internet surveys of his forum buddies are sufficient for WPATH to declare that patients diagnosed as having a eunuch gender identity (which is presumably any patient who claims to identify as a eunuch, which I suspect would go up orders of magnitude if psychiatrists started telling patients about the idea or the it got any cultural traction) will benefit from "gender-affirming care".
This tells us very little about eunuchs, but it tells us a lot about WPATH's decision-making processes. It also tells us important information about the institutions that continue to reference other WPATH recommendations as if they're significantly more meaningful than a sheet of paper with "Yes X is a gender-identity, prescribe gender-affirming care." printed on it. Or for that matter institutions that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect.
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I saw this stuff probably a month ago, briefly thought about writing it up, and then let it lie because there didn't seem to be a way to do the subject justice without tripping the "low charity" alarm. I think you probably did better than I would have, but I think it could use a better ending. Ditch the partisan voice, sum up the factual content dispassionately, and then lay out why this is worth talking about.
Here's my take on a few productive questions:
Is WPATH influential?
Are these guys influential within WPATH?
Is their behavior objectionable, and if so why?
If it is objectionable, has the system produced a reasonable response?
If the system has not produced a reasonable response, what's the appropriate way to talk about this here?
...I think a lot of Reds are going to think this is a pretty big deal. I think a lot of Blues are going to think it's not that big a deal, for a variety of reasons. So what size of deal should this be?
...I appreciate that from a tribal perspective, the fact that these questions would even be asked is itself something of a problem. But this is not a tribal space, and battle-cries do not contribute to the conversation. Such questions do need to be asked here, because the evidence indicates that we, collectively, are not on the same page on this. So what's the scope and scale of the disagreement, and where do the borders lie?
[EDIT] - looking at the conversation below... Does this look productive to you?
Most of the red responses are sardonic call-backs to memes. Those memes arose from a lot of previous arguments, but most of those arguments, by volume, didn't happen here, and most of the people who made them aren't here now, and the memes themselves are not in fact an argument. Why should the people who are here now engage with an attack on statements they haven't actually made? This whole mode of communication is just passive-aggressive as hell.
The blue responses mostly are about this problem. I'll note that some of them are actually moving beyond that to engage with the content! That's commendable! ...And then reds are low-effort snarking at them for it.
This all would go a whole lot better without the implying implications, and just a bare statement of facts and arguments to sum up what seems to me to be a relevant and readable post.
I see how it could be improved, but I swear it wasn't partisanship! I was expecting the story to have the same status as Jeffrey Epstein - so out there, both sides can unite on being shocked at the whole thing. In hindsight, it was naive, given how sensitive the trans issues are but I thought we could make a separation between that, and WPATH in particular.
Not exactly what I was looking for, no. I mentioned in another comment, I find the conspiracism vs "nothing to see here, move along" angle a lot more interesting.
No. If the goal is to build respect between the two sides, we can't have one side treat the other like they were babies. It's not commendable, it's expected. Imagine writing something like that in response to one of ymeshkout's posts about election fraud.
I think the thread is dying down a bit, so I don't know if I can have much impact on the conversation, but I can still answer these if you want.
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To a moderate extent, yes. They're not binding, and some jurisdictions actually prohibit some of their policies, but a lot of US-sphere medical practices will take it as the starting point, and the extent it exists as an organization with standards makes matters more billable. Some of that's probably the dog being wagged by its tail -- pre-2010-era trans stuff did reflect a lot of contradictory and not very well-considered rules (eg, requiring three months life experience before cross-hormone therapy basically required a lot of really bad attempts at passing in public) -- but it's hard to distinguish.
Hard to tell. Simply being a member of WPATH isn't that constrained; there's something like 4k members in the US, it's 225 USD/year (with discounts for low-income countries) and open to a wide variety of 'professionals' for voting membership, so that doesn't really much. On the other hand, Johnson is cited as an author in the draft SoCv8 (though, AFAICT not past SoCs), and Johnson, Wassersug both have research cited in the SoC.
((Willette isn't listed on the current membership directory or obviously cited on the research lists; the big connection here to WPATH seems to be a link to older research or public talks, but this could be the multiple author problem.))
It could be that they've played a longer-term role behind the scenes, or it could be that WPATH decision-makers already had the answer they wanted and just pointed to the first extant member who'd published anything adjacent to their target. I think part of the Red Tribe objection assumes at least in part the former (ie, that the casual treatment of therapies for trans-women are motivated in part by liking the side effects), but I don't think the latter would a high point even by the low standards of social science.
I dunno. The fetish content is creepy, but 'people with a kink fantasize about legal acceptance of the kink' going into fantasies about a mandate isn't exactly unusual; if anything, it's bog-standard among free use and exhibitionists, and not unheard of elsewhere. On its own, I don't think it's terribly strong evidence favoring actually implementing such things, so much as it's something that the authors both desire and want to avoid the mental hoops of taking responsibility for desiring. Hypnosis kink and (among women) 'abduction' kink plays a pretty similar role, and there's even some pretty bog-standard gay furries who use a variant because they've got hangups about 'choosing' to be gay.
((That said, there's only a handful of furries that take to eunich/nullo/neutrois levels, and afaik none of them as trans-adjacent. Maybe Chris Goodwin?))
But it does raise serious questions about the strength of their research, especially given the relative lack of other researchers going after the same community (and... not exactly paranoid concerns that they've played a role in what other research that does exist). Weirdly fetishistic Q/A stories don't necessarily invalidate the same author doing conventional research, but I think there are serious data science problems with running one of these forums and using it as a data source, and that's if the author did actually disclose it.
I don't think so, and perhaps worse, I'm not sure it can. I think the minimum for Red Tribe trust would involve some sort of moderately skeptical analysis of this stuff being taken seriously in public spaces, but there's not really a way for that to exist right now; academic research isn't going to publish (and probably shouldn't publish!) a 'hey, these guys are creepy weirdos with bad understandings of physical side effects to their interests', but more broadly no one sane's going to spend twenty years of their life on the matter on the off-chance that it becomes higher-profile.
((and I include myself as 'not sane' here))
But on the other hand, I'm not sure that the Red Tribe interest is in a reasonable response. WhiningCoil's self-described framework for this post below is that "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children." That's true in the strictest sense, but it's also The Worst Argument In the World, where expanded it becomes "These people (three of a dozen experts, plus the thousands of unaffiliated and unassociated doctors and shrinks doing the work) want to mutilate and sterilize (voluntarily) children (14-18-year-olds, which we do a variety of other not-exactly-great surgeries on)", in the same way that advocates for these policies are committing the same non-central fallacy when they compare the surgeries here to orchi or prostate removal for cancer treatment.
I'd expect that both WhiningCoil and the authors here would take similarly distinct positions on the availability of endometrial ablation as an option for sixteen-year-old women with extremely severe periods and no interest in reproduction (and actually doctors do!), even though the matter is clearly separate from trans stuff and from the sexual interests here, or even any externally visible modification.
On the gripping hand, there's a fun philosophical question about whether 20%+ of the voting population can be taxiomatically unreasonably on both the right and left, but the pragmatic side you kinda need a solution.
Dunno. I'd expect it would be helpful to focus more on the object level by WhiningCoil rather than repeating the vaguries, and to actually do some of his own homework for ChrisPratt, but that's kinda on the margins. I think ChrisPratt's pretty outright focused on the literal and central examples of sexual abuse of children, while WhiningCoil's concerns are far broader.
Plastic surgery (and other controversial elective surgeries like liposuction or bariatric surgery) exist, but they're controversial enough that they're not really good examples even if social conservatives don't really go after them with the same strength that they do (directly) sexual/sexuality stuff. Non-trans hysterectomy and endometrial ablation are similarly politically complicated, though in ways that don't break down into simple Red Tribe/Blue Tribe splits. And there are other 'cosmetic' plastic surgeries that are still pretty well-established for young patients that I wouldn't put into this category, like cleft lip repair.
But for a really outside-the-box example that isn't controversial because everyone accepts it, the current standard of care for all non-Becker's birthmarks over 20 cm, and for most other 'hairy' non-Becker's birthmarks over 2 cm, includes surgical removal or laser 'surgery' (basically high-power light therapy). This had a historic cause, since there's a small subclass of that may have an elevated chance of cancer, and historically for any birthmark in this class it was practical to remove, a meaningful biopsy was almost as invasive as the full surgery to remove it and nearby tissue.
We could now evaluate these in higher levels of fidelity without having to cut out large portions of tissue, so we could reduce the number of total surgeries being performed on minors. But the birthmarks do genuinely look pretty ugly, and they're very common targets for stigma and self-image problems, and surgery performed at younger ages tends to have better recovery and less obvious scarring than surgeries on older people (or, in the case of haemangiomas, can have less visually obvious scarring than what occurs as the haemangiomas naturally shrink and fade with age).
There seems a somewhat similar class of matters for some dental surgeries, where the results are aesthetically pleasing and have some ease-of-care benefits, but have complicated tradeoffs for health directly. I know less about that field, though.
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So shines a good deed in a weary world.
this... this is insightful. It connects to a whole lot of patterns I see in a lot of much more conventional lowbrow material; fanfic, pulp stories, web fiction and so on. Sort of a desire to offload moral responsibility to one's circumstances and surroundings. Most interesting.
I think there's a bit more to it.
Reds think that a significant percentage of Trans people are actually engaging in a sexual fetish, not a mental state or some sort of deeply rooted gender identity. Certainly a lot of highly noticeable behavior by specific trans people seems difficult to explain in any other way. This is vehemently denied by Blues, whose counter-arguments start with Chinese cardiologists.
Reds think that Blues are in denial about the fetish aspect of the trans movement, along with a lot of other, similar aspects (tactical transness and pedophilia, to name two); the Red model says that Blues understand on some level that such behavior looks absolutely horrible to Normies, and they also understand that policing such behavior would mean conceding 90% of what Reds are fighting for on the issue. At a minimum, it would mean gatekeeping and skepticism about claims of transness, and the conflict between the two results in concealing the issue and attacking anyone who brings it up.
This is an example of people in the movement being pretty clearly in it for the fetish, in a way that should definately have resulted in some sort of social safeguards being activated. The absence of such social safeguards is evidence for the general Red argument: Blues cannot be trusted to think critically or act responsibly where this issue is concerned, because their social biases overrule what should be basic, axiomatic values. Their social immune system doesn't work, in short, and so social contagion runs rampant, necessitating quarantine.
Blues have a different view, of course, but as you say, we kinda need a solution.
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What, do you want us to die of boredom?
I for one appreciate the post the way it is: there's a hook, an explanation, and a got'cha. It's Shakespeare.
nara did a bit of redhat killjoying, but in the proper way that I enjoy about this place. Also, I see one meme reply so far, not a bunch.
Thank you, it made my day to hear someone enjoyed it! I'm not much of a writer, but I'd lie if I said there wasn't some amount of artistic expression going into this.
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Now come on, you know it's only a few odd people on Twitter, or a few kids on college campuses, and it never ever happens in reality, and if it does it's only very, very rare and it's conservatives blowing up a few incidents into a big conspiracy...
... and if it does happen, then they deserved it/it's good and normal
Contribute something more than snark, please.
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I know it's being made fun of often, but what exactly is per se inconsistent about a combination of views that amounts to "you are pretending (your positions) to be losing when you are actually winning, and I actually wish you were in fact losing"? In a culture basically hardwired to support underdogs (ceteris paribus), the most reliable way to drive home a win is to maintain the narrative of loss, thus overcoming the bias towards balance that starts working against you once you cross the fifty-fifty mark. If you are a right-winger, you would do well to feel exactly the same about the left's response to any minuscule win that you consider to be yours (a bunch of people coming out to protest for a nativist party, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, Trump and allies actually implementing a "Trumpian" policy for once...).
Well yeah, we know it's rational to use that tactic, and we know you know it's rational. That's why we read that message into e.g. smirking denials that child mutilation fetishists are writing their pedo fiction into public policy. You can't read it any other way once the tactic is common knowledge.
That's why I've been begging any of you for the love of God to oppose it instead of just denying it, to no success.
I don't think the duplicity you are implying is actually part of it, though, at least consciously. In my estimation, the typical left-wing activist really does believe that the forces of society are arrayed against them and attacks on some sexual-politics NGO like this one are an instance of the way in which the overwhelming forces of society assert themselves the moment they attain the smallest victory.
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I was familiar with the EA and the mentioned posters back when they enforced the rules about not supporting this stuff on minors. Honestly, I participated in some of Jesus's research threads (never knew he posted in the stories section. The others don't surprise me.) Seeing them going from careful and professional to doing cartwheels down the slippery slope is ... disappointing, to put it mildly. I remember when people got modded for seeming too enthusiastic about the new policy recommendations. Heck, mods there provided plenty of information in agreement with the prevalence of both desisting after puberty and fettish-driven fixation on castration. And that's just what I got from the handful of boards I bothered reading (Eunuch Central, the general health board, and occasionally the surgical/chemical castration boards. I once poked my head into the stories section, read the titles, and noped the f out of there.)
Wow, thanks for talking about it. Didn't expect we'd have any firsthand experience here. Do you have insights into the board culture you think would help explain the whole thing to people, if you're comfortable talking about it?
Think I kinda recognize some things by analogy to niche groups I've been in. Is there like this undercurrent of equivocation between an official community slogan of "haha imagine not being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality", and very active community leaders obviously taking it uncomfortably seriously?
I'm not sure I was ever involved deeply enough to give a meaningful response, but to the best of my recollection...
I was most active around 2008-2012. At the time, there was a very sharp divide between the different sections of the forums (and there were quite a lot of sections, organized into categories). It seemed like most of the active participants in the sections I visited were middle-aged men/eunuchs, with a smattering of 18-50s filling things out. User motivations ranged from fettishistic and body modification (I recall a frequent poster whose username was "splitdick"), to gender identity and BIID, to medical issues requiring castration (prostate/testicular cancer or injury, etc), to autistic or religious people citing a desire to remove the distraction/temptation of sexuality to focus on what they really cared about. There were lots of personal anecdotes, and Jesus et al (but mostly Jesus) provided academic references when appropriate.
The general pattern was to always, always discourage rushing into castration, even though there was frequent lamenting the lack of support from the medical community. One young, fit christian poster kinda scared most of the active members by confidently skipping the recommended preparation and getting surgically castrated very quickly after opening discussion. On the other hand, there was a middle-aged autist who spent many years trying to convince doctors to help, and wound up bringing an elastrator to an appointment to demonstrate the ability to castrate himself if no surgeon would do it in a safer way (this was apparently when the doctor in question was utterly terrified of anyone discovering that he gave in to the threat).
There were threads about castration of minors, and the mods seemed to watch those closely and take action if anyone seemed too supportive of castrating minors IRL. I think there were also serious concerns about doxxing (one poster apparently had direct experience with at least one-three teenagers who were castrated in the Netherlands for non-trans medical reasons, and had a habit of revealing more detail than was necessary, and got modded for it). One of the admins not mentioned here (Palo, IIRC) had plenty of stories about boys expressing interest in castration prior to puberty, then changing their minds almost immediately afterward.
And as I recall, there were lots and lots of origin stories involving boys observing the castration of livestock.
Now that I'm trying to remember everything I can, I do recall a discussion that got uncomfortably positive toward sexual experiences for boys, particularly between 10 and 14. I recall someone (I forget who) posting large chunks of an article about various men's experiences when they were underaged, to which some posters replied with fond recollections of being 10-14 and getting molested by older teenagers.
Ultimately, what I got out of it was a lot of medical information, and a confusing mix of support for wanting to escape sexuality and also so much explicit sexuality, that I really couldn't say much about what was really going on. In the bits of the forums I read, Jesus generally posted in a very dry, academic manner, and Kristof came across as a grumpy old vet who was getting too old for this shit and really just wanted to be a nun. I kinda got the impression that some accounts, like Kristof and Palo, were often held by older people in the community, and might have changed hands when the original user died, but I never confirmed that. Palo came across as both the top mod and the one who took moderating for safety most seriously (though, there are mods I don't remember so well, so take that with some salt).
Oh, and the pushing for a male-to-eunuch identity thing was always there. Jesus was pretty open about trying to publish research to encourage medical recognition of such an identity. I'm more surprised that the others got involved in the publications and such, since they always struck me as more oriented toward the community than being involved as researchers directly.
I feel like I have not answered the question. :(
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This is obnoxious, don't do this.
You've managed to garner a pretty impressive array of reports (nine so far) including AAQC nominations and "boo outgroup" complaints. The tone of your presentation is... excessively smarmy, I guess I want to say. It doesn't invite discussion. And yes, some portion of that may be the natural result of you Noticing things you're not, on some views, allowed to Notice. But this is not a space where you get modded for Noticing, this is a space where you get modded for not speaking plainly. Don't connect a few dots and then dangle implications, here. Make an argument. Tell us what you think the evidence on offer tells you.
You really read through all of that to find the one thing you don't like?
They were trying to express frustration... And did it effectively.
As a reader of the site, please don't do this.
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People with specific sexual fetishes centring on castration of minors are now being accepted as experts when it comes to setting policy dealing with minors engaging in decisions about medical treatment including hormones and surgery?
That seems to be the OP's argument, but it's just made in an obtuse and somewhat annoying way. It could have been shorter and more direct. Write for clarity, not amusement, and all that.
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I get modded every time I outright say "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children." Now he's getting modded for provided reams of evidence for any reasonable person to come to that conclusion themselves, cheekily hinting at it. Possibly because he saw me modded for saying it directly, who's to know.
You say you won't get modded for noticing, so people don't need to play coy. I don't believe you.
You were most recently moderated here. Let's take a look at what Zorba said about it:
This does not quite fit your interpretation of why you were moderated. In your case, you stated your view without bringing evidence. This post did the opposite--brought evidence, of a kind, while failing to state a view. The best way to avoid moderation on high-heat issues is to carefully bring both evidence and argument, along with a heap of charity for the outgroup.
I'll plead guilty to not keeping with the rules or their spirit, but I think @drmanhattan16 above explained the issue much better:
I do like a good horror story, and I think I got carried away writing this post.
I guess this also means I never get to make fun of wannabe writers, who pour out their frustrations onto news articles ever again.
For what it's worth, as a horror story it's pretty good - it does a great job selling the mounting sense of dread as new information is presented.
Just that's not what The Motte is for.
Maybe we need a The Motte Horror Story Hour thread, where we can post purely facts-based horror stories.
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Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:
and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):
which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.
I'd agree that the evidence in this post is lacking, and this is a perfect example of the exact sort of question the OP should have concluded with. The articles I heard of this from very clearly portrayed Johnson, Wassersug and Willette as enthusiastic participants in the castration fetish scene, along with evidence that seemed to back their assertions reasonably well, but I likewise did not check primary sources, and the source I found it from was fairly partisan. I did google the names and found the papers they'd written drawing on the fiction archive as a research resource, but that doesn't answer the question.
I'd readily agree that dispassionate researchers engaging in some niche anthropology is very different from extreme-fetish enjoyers smuggling their thing into academia, and then into actual policy. If the former is the case, I'm pretty sure I still have some pointed objections, but would agree that this instance isn't directly relevant to the larger issues. The same would go if it could be argued that these guys weren't actually relevant to the WPATH drafting, or that WPATH isn't actually influential to policy. That chain is the actual story the above is hinting at, and the fact that it's hinting rather than laying it out is my objection to the post as a whole.
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Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?
One of those three people is administrator of the fetish website. If you want to claim that the persona administrating the website itself is doing so merely out of academic curiosity, then go ahead and make that claim, but the far likelier claim is that the guy who administrates, and participates, in the fetish website is himself a fetishist.
https://reduxx.info/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated-with-castration-child-abuse-fetishists/
https://reduxx.info/top-academic-behind-fetish-site-hosting-child-sexual-abuse-fantasy-push-to-revise-wpath-guidelines/
Unkind. The background reading doesn't really answer the question to my satisfaction. This is a case where the words written down are projecting an image to the reader that they don't actually, specifically support. I happen to be fairly confident that the image projected is, in fact, quite accurate, but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.
Not very, and absolutely warranted. Asking questions that were answered in the OP, or in the article he quoted, is not an indication of someone wanting to find the answer.
Sure. Since there seems to be a lot meta-talk about form in this thread, I'd also like to ask: do you think it would kill him to say something like "Wow, that's pretty wild! But do you think you could clarify these questions for me..."?
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From the original post:
.
Can you link the post where I say anything like that?
All 3 had active forum accounts for over 20 years. Johnson was apparently a founding member of the site. That's a looot of research.
If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.
Did the Freakonomics guys go on to recommend policy that goes easy on drug dealers, or something?
I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.
Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:
Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.
Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.
All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.
Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?
I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?
They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.
An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit. It's like if, for example, someone criticized the National Organization for Women for giving Mattress Girl their Woman of Courage award even after the text messages came out discrediting her rape accusation. And then you responded with "Sure it looks like she falsely accused him in retaliation for him breaking up with her and/or for the personal benefits, but NOW has 500,000 members, can you prove the majority of them share her motive?" Clearly they don't need to, the relevant members of their organization hold to a "Believe Women"/"Believe Survivors" ideology and so a single liar with sufficient skill at invoking the ideology was all it took. But instead of just being a response to a single incident, it's WPATH establishing a medical standard. And instead of being an openly non-neutral activist organization, it's the most prominent independent organization setting standards for trans healthcare, one that countless medical institutions listen to.
This then provides valuable insight into the validity of WPATH's decision-making processes, like knowing a medical/scientific organization wrote the conclusion of an argument first. And as I said in my other post, it also gives us valuable information about the processes of institutions that continue to take their recommendations seriously or "that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect". For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to. However, many other authorities like the American Medical Association have not. If a lot of institutions are making decisions on the subject are heavily influenced by social justice ideology, that is valuable information in judging this split. And yes, I already knew that so it's not going to shift my opinion very much, there's already been varying levels of other evidence like the mass-resignations complaining about ideological pressure a few years ago at the NHS's only gender clinic for children (since shut down as of a few months ago). But a lot of people think things like the shift to maximally "gender-affirming care" are just about following the evidence rather than ideological pressure and so this provides a valuable test case.
Based on your other post, I'm curious how you account for people desperate to castrate themselves if not some odd innate quirk, but we can set that to the side for the moment.
That's a fair point on the influence of those three, although it also depends on the broader argument you're trying to push. Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation? Because that was the sense I got from OP, and I still largely don't believe that (although I'm open to more evidence). Moreover, only Johnson is listed as an author for the WPATH guidelines, not the other two (only cited). I'd wonder whether other people worked on it as well, editorial oversight, etc.
But your point that I was too dismissive of their influence is well taken.
I'll grant this too. I don't mean this as a gotcha, but what would you prefer instead? It seems unlikely to me that trans-skeptic (? not sure of the term) people will do gender studies for 6 years of a PhD in order to represent their side in professional organizations, and moreover, that conservative spaces are just as hostile an ideological milieu to any evidence that would purport to find benefits to accepting trans folk as their chosen gender (which I've seen cited numerous times; whether they actually hold water, I've never tried to figure out). I find it hard to believe that in some fantastical world where some unbiased body did publish such a study that conservatives would read it, shrug their shoulders, and the issue would die.
You might argue that I'm comparing apples to oranges by juxtaposing a body of PhDs and MDs with 'Cletus from Alabama' (as other people have said when making this criticism). But with the legislatures getting involved, Cletus be flexing his muscles whatever the eggheads at WPATH say and his opinion is making decisions in this arena.
Thanks for the links, and taking the time to lay out your argument. Appreciate it.
This is Kiwi Farms line, that is now official conservative line on which the "groomer" campaign is based.
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eunuch-community.13954/page-4
Is this really all what is it all about? Is small group of people dedicated to one bizarre fetish really the greatest secret manipulators and masterminds in history?
David Cole from Takimag (someone known as Jewish Holocaust denier is not someone expected to be too woke) strongly disagrees.
https://www.takimag.com/article/doom-and-groomer/
...
Of course, they are talking about different people, leaders and common soldiers.
Still, why this particular fetish was normalized?
Follow the money. There is no profit out there. Look, for example, at furry fandom - even the most dedicated fans could not spend more than low four figures on fursuit, and exit is easy - just put your fursuit in wardrobe and let it here.
Transgenderism is for life, and it is unprecedented money maker for big pharma and big medicine.
If people were rationally following their interest, we would see them support T cause, and we do.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
https://archive.ph/XH5v5
These are the three sources of movement that changed the world.
This is a little hard to believe, because the "for life" parts (i.e., hormones) are generic medications and they're dirt cheap.
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Sorry to single you out, but this is exactly the sort of response mindset I was addressing with they "well, I suppose ... Hey guys!" rhetorical flourish that bothered @SSCReader so much.
My claim was simple: castration fetishists managed to get positions of influence in a fairy impactful organization, and are using them to push their fetish into the standards of care for transgender people. To prove my claim I:
Pointed to a forum where castration fetishists gather.
Showed that some of it's most veteran members of the WPATH, who were invited to several conferences where the standards of care are debated.
Quoted an excerpt from that standards of care that is directly to the fetish.
Pointed out that the chapter cites the very forum these members regularly post at, and have been active for over 20 years.
If my post was limited to the first 3 points, I could understand dismissing it as a run of the mill conspiracy theory. I'd disagree, but I could understand it, as this is how the conspiracy discourse has gone on for the past several decades. I'm not going to call the fourth point the final nail in the coffin, but we are getting to the point where it's going to be quite a bit of work to reopen it again.... I was expecting pretty much everyone to agree, that at the very least this raises several red flags.
What I got in response was:
"Move along, nothing to see here...". Then I was asked:
whether the academics attending the WPATH conferences actually wrote any stories (addressed in the OP)
whether they were fetishists, or just academics studying them (addressed in the article I linked, and was quoted to argue against me)
to provide examples of more "blatant" and/or "pedophilic" content, because evidence that at least one of them wrote stories there suddenly wasn't enough (and if I managed to do that it would "slightly" updated towards my original claim, and all it would conclusively prove is that 3 out of over 4000 WPATH members are eunuch fetishists, which is not relevant to my claim at all).
to provide survey data about the fetishes of all WPATH members?! Which... how am I suppose to that to begin with, and what does it have to do with my original claim?
This is just reflexive denialism, and exactly what my rhetorical flourishes were poking fun at. I'll plead guilty to not staying with the spirit of the forum, but I hope it's clear now that it wasn't a broad attack on the blue tribe, but at a certain epistemology.
I tried to engage you politely and in good faith, but since you disagree, I apologize for the offense and I'll leave you to your more productive conversations with other folks.
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It's hard to find information for the more recent stories, but this seems to cover up to 2008. Of the three named accounts, only "Jesus" has pieces listed. Of those two, "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?" could be arguably just academic and medical discussion, if somewhat overly optimistic about its frameworks, but "Making of the Modern World" is the sort of 'world-building' that makes the gay stories with 'and all the women went on a vacation/died of irrelevance' seem like high art. And it does include some material focused on young people :
The piece starts with a foreward openly inviting other authors to write about:
This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories. On the other hand, I do think it dramatically reduces my confidence that this paper is meaningfully useful: there are people who can describe a fetish community from the inside, but there's remarkably few who can do so in a sphere with policy ramifications hitting their interests without putting a thumb on the scales. Worse, having the same persons also involved immediately with the SoC8 draft allows and encourages a lot of citation massaging: that paper is summarized at one point to "As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care."
"Eunuchunique" and "Kristoff" do not seem to have published stories under those names, at least as of copies of the story archive I can find, and the forums a) seem to have been nuked a few times and b) don't seem to be publicly available, so it's a little hard to talk on that side.
Thanks! That was a wild ride.
It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.
As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.
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Generally when the Republican Politicians and Catholic Priests are caught doing unspeakable things, they've made some effort to hide the behavior. These guys were pretty open about their unspeakableness, and nobody at WPATH seems to have had a problem with them. Elsewhere in the thread, people are linking to claims that Wikipedia's staff likewise doesn't seem to have a problem with them. I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?
If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?
...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities. Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?
I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.
My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.
So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?
The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?
The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.
Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?
Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.
The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.
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To be fair, all of the papers I can access skip over the question of how Johnson/Wassersug developed a relationship with the eunuch forums, in favor of summarizing how the survey specifically was performed. Johnson didn't do a great job of obfuscating his identity, but it's both plausible and likely that it's only obvious in retrospect or if you were already following the community extremely closely.
The academic papers and citations aren't great, but on their own they're not clearly malicious rather than just weirdly amoral.
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I don't think "republican politicians" are experts on anything other than their own beliefs, nor do I present them as disinterested authority figures.
But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.
Well, I've been asked to detail the evidence that would support a change in my beliefs. You (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) think that some significant fraction of academics have conflicts of interest based on their sexual preferences. What evidence would convince you that a robust majority (say >95%) of these experts are, in fact, coming from a place of wanting to do what's best for the youth rather than pursuing their own sexual fantasies?
I wouldn't go so far as to say 'disinterested' as the criticism that these academics believe in a broader trans rights agenda independent of their research or data almost certainly is true for a majority, and it's not clear to me at least that the data warrant some of the claims that are made.
Depends on the field and generation. At least in the life sciences/medicine, there seem to be an even mix of altruists and ego monsters, but no conflict of interests in the same way that I could see in the humanities. I expect it's similar in the harder sciences. Maybe you're right for the humanities, although it would be interesting to see, for example, the breakdown of cis vs. trans academics in WPATH.
In a highly unscientific poll, I picked 8 profiles at random from WPATH and of the 6 I could track down 2 were transgender. So you're probably right that a significant fraction are trans. As (I think) you gesture at, they may well punch above their weight in terms of influence.
So, what's to be done? Are we just going to be partisans poking each other in the eye for eternity? When we reach an impasse without the data to get an answer, do we just shrug and lower our guns for the time being and move onto other things?
Well, at the risk of people complaining I'm not doing my homework again, why do you think she's a creep? Because of the way she advertises to minors on tiktok, or glamorizes plastic surgery? Ah, I see your edit. So you think she gets off on removing body parts from healthy people?
Surgeons have been doing radical mastectomies for breast cancer for decades, and it was quite controversial for a while. If I remember the section from Emperor of all Maladies correctly, common practice in the early days was to take all of both breasts regardless of the stage or size of the cancer. Do you think cannibals and fetishists were/are overrepresented among surgeons as well? Or do you think she's specifically into the pedophilic aspect of it?
To clarify, you want pushback against the three individuals from OP and Dr. Gallagher from within WPATH?
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Did you read the post? The article with the reader's digest punchline is noted as written by Jesus, the purported username of one of the doctors.
I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?
What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?
It is fictional story set in utopian (for the author) far future, I think it was clear from the context.
The shining future predicted by the author indeed came true, we are all wearing mirror shades and we love it.
Was it a conspiracy, or just people working together to achieve their dreams?
Many cases of fiction influencing real life - just remember all the science fiction fans who worked on real space program and helped to make their vision a reality.
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See, what happened there is that this was a story, a work of fiction, set in the future. So, while the story itself was published in 2002, the internal elements included things like "this is a Readers' Digest article from 2017". You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?
I agree, it's very odd to think Readers' Digest would still be a thing in 2017, maybe that is what confused you?
Wait, but how did he know what would happen in 1984 if (as you claim) he was writing the book in 1948? How did he avoid getting in trouble for misinformation by, like, the 1948 version of facebook mods?
Shocking, I know, but they didn't even have mods back in 1948! Can you imagine?
It's official, Hitler happened because they didn't have mods.
Fortunately though we got mods in the fifties, eventually culminating in the greatest mod of all time, Mick Jagger.
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The reader's digest 2017 citation was the punchline within the story, the joke being (on EA in 2002) that by 2017 becoming a eunuch will be a normie, reader's digest type activity.
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The "2017" was part of the story posted in 2002 about castration being normalized in (then) future year.
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There's currently a Request for Comment on the talk page for the Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People regarding this issue.
Thank you, it's an incredible read.
It looks like the No's are going to win using all the usual tactics.
Clouds of ink, browbeating, veiled and open threats, constantly changing the definition of terms and moving goalposts, demands for impossible evidence, hordes of supporting partisans rushing in to gang up on people. It's amazing to see the party struggle session perfected and enacted so casually at the slightest hint of Wrong Opinions.
And all the same things being done here. Is there any explanation for the reflexive denial other than blatant support for the pedo-castration fetishists?
Remind me again how the old sweet song goes: "there is no such thing as the slippery slope, that's a fallacy".
So now transgender activists of a certain stripe have moved on from "all we want is to be able to use the bathroom we feel comfortable using" to "eunuch identity is totally an orientation that should be recognised under the LGBT umbrella".
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It’s unfortunate that discussing the link between transgenderism and sexual fetishism has been made taboo in public discourse. If you spend any amount of time in online transgender communities you’ll see that the fetishistic aspects are clearly a huge component of it.
You can't call it a fetish, because if it's a fetish, then I get to say "keep that shit away from me, don't involve me in your fetish."
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That's the angle I find the least interesting. Even if true, it doesn't say much about where we should take the discourse on trans issues.
What I find absolutely fascinating is the entryism aspect, or laundering ideology through respectable-looking institutions, and our system being either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
Yeah, that's the thing. Ordinary trans people have been used as the stalking horse for the fetishists and the grifters taking advantage of "hey, if I say I'm a woman, I can get sent to women's prison not men's prison".
Few years back, when I was discussing the trans rights stuff with other people on another site, I and those who were dubious about the whole thing like I was were being assured that "What you fear will never happen; no man or boy is going to go to all the trouble of saying they are trans simply in order for some peeping tom opportunities". A little later, after the first offences by individuals claiming to be trans, the line was "they're not really trans, they're ordinary perverts/criminals" (this, despite the simultaneous line that "you're trans if you say you're trans, no gatekeeping").
I think people have nailed their political colours to the mast and invested too much time and effort, often for personal reasons, into trans rights activism so they feel any backing off or accepting the cases where conservatives were right are going to mean giving up everything, so they grit their teeth and ignore this stuff and if they have to, they come out and support it. Because otherwise, the right-wingers were right about the things they said would happen if trans activism got its way about social normalisation, and that undermines everything they've fought for.
I feel like there's an interaction with the binary oppressor/oppressed model here. I've seen similar contentions, where the premise is that nobody would ever claim a marginalized identity falsely or lightly, because the experience of the Oppressed is categorically worse than the experience of the Oppressor. There is nothing that could possibly be worth the agonies of the soul one would be taking on to claim an Oppressed identity, save the pure truth of the matter itself.
The binary model cannot permit any recognition that it is ever, under any circumstances, in any way, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor; the binary all-or-nothing thinking would make such an admission tantamount to claiming that it is always, under all circumstances, in all ways, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor, in which case you're claiming that their real statuses are reversed, and are attacking the moral justification of the Oppressed group. Attempts at nuance or complexity or using one's head instead of one's gut will feel, on that gut-level, like nothing more than a direct enemy attack.
Does this really happen or am I just making this up? Well: have you ever heard someone say "[so you're saying that Xs are] the real oppressors" or "...really oppressed", when the matter of a potential advantage to belonging to an oppressed group is discussed?
I have.
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Certainly knowing the etiology of a phenomenon is an important step towards developing a holistic understanding of it.
I'm not saying that all cases of transgenderism can be reduced to a fetish, but, it's still something to keep in mind.
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How /d/are you >_>
In seriousness, one major problem is actually having to talk about the subject knowing people are going to reply "ok, let's see your open tabs Kurt Eichenwald."
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Can we not? Discuss the culture war not wage it is our raison d'etre. Your whole spiel would be much more fitting without the feigned Hey guys rhetorical device. State your point clearly. This might be interesting to discuss but with the partisan trappings splashed all over it why bother?
Perhaps address what they were writing?
Or if it's not for you, maybe move on?
What are you adding here, except for style policing?
Style policing is a valuable part of building a discussion community like this one. That was the entire point of my comment! We have very specific rules and norms around tone and style, entirely separate from the content.
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Mentioning this at all is very partisan. I liked how it was styled. What did he get wrong
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But at least he did get you to acknowledge the post, if not to address the evidence in any way. That's better than the usual outcome.
Straw that broke the camels back. Nothing especially bad about this post compared to a number of other norm eroding posts I am seeing.
I guess we're on to the "ignore except to subtweet about the stench of evil right wing bare links posts getting worse" step already.
It's sad how predictable it is. Could you actually address his post, as a favor to me?
Nope. Nothing you are saying in anyway makes me think that is a good idea. Perhaps reconsider your approach?
No need to change my approach: you've already explained more than enough about your reaction to the evidence. All that's left is waiting for the "and it's good!" step in a few months.
It's amazing that the same tactics work for you over and over again, but why change what works.
I've explained exactly nothing about my reaction to the evidence. The only thing I have talked about is my critique of how the point was made. You are familiar with the Motte yes? This is very much our bread and butter. Nearly any point can be made, but we have rules and a culture around HOW the point should be made.
It should be plain, it should be written as is people you disagree with are reading and you WANT them to read. It should avoid Boo Outgrouping and should optimize for light and not heat etc. etc.
Could you help him rewrite his post so that people with a fetish for castrating children felt more included in the conversation? That would be a very helpful and productive alternative to complaining about his tone, and double as active engagement with the evidence.
You two could even do an adversarial collaboration on it!
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Both the ending, and the rhetorical flourishes were meant to be a bit of harmless fun. For whatever it's worth, this was not aimed at your tribe, or even trans people, if anything I was poking fun at habitual conspiracy-deniers.
To be clear, I am not even sure about what your accusation is supposed to be. That's the point of the state clearly rule. I assume you're saying that these people are driving trans changes because they have an eunuch fetish, but it might be because you think they are mentally ill or because you think they are evil. I certainly didn't get you were poking fun at conspiracy deniers.
I'm not clear on what your specific point actually is. Which is why stating it outright somewhere would be helpful, even if you have to keep the rhetorical flourishes. Just a suggestion.
You think my post would have been better if I called them evil or mentally ill? I didn't say any of that because I don't know, and it doesn't matter. The factual part "these people are driving trans changes because they have an eunuch fetish" is enough to stand, and be discussed on it's own.
A common trope in dismissing conspiracy theories is calling everything a coincidence, and dismissing any personal connections as playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". The point of the other rhetorical flourish - "well, I suppose" - was exactly the point of making fun of that, right up until you see the SOC document literally citing the fetish forum.
Duly noted, but it sounds like you got exactly what I was saying, it's just that you were expecting there's more to it.
I think your post would have been better if I was sure what your point was. What specifically was the conspiracy you are making fun of the deniers denying. Who denied it and when? What is the light that would come from the discussion?
Yes I got that part. Sadly, I couldn't know ahead of time what you'll be able to catch, and what you'd find confusing.
Any one that's plausible but lacking smoking-gun evidence. The one that's the most analogous is woke entryism into institutions with cultural influence, but any one will do - from Epstein running a child-prostituion Ponzi Scheme (before the evidence was released), Epstein not killing himself, to the COVID lab leak or Big Pharma collaborating to discredit ivermectin.
What would be accomplished by listing all the times and places a specific conspiracy theory was denied?
That to move past shady thinking, I think we need to stop dismissing any hypothesis just because it's a conspiracy theory.
That we might need to increase scrutiny on our institutions, because they seem the be very vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors.
Well if you want us to talk about whether it is a conspiracy or not (as opposed to just making fun of people who think it is) then that would be helpful, no? If your post was just to make fun of those people, then what is it's value here?
If your point is
Then why not just say that specifically? Those are good points and worth discussing. But you didn't actually mention those things in your original post. Are the eunuchs malicious actors? Are they manipulating the situation? If those are your factual claims then make your point around that. But your post doesn't say that. It kind of gives a wink wink nudge nudge in that direction. Which we should avoid in my opinion here, at least.
Is your position that these people are malicious actors? If so just say so. If not, then say that instead.
No? I don't see how citing every time someone denied these conspiracies would bring anything to the discussion.
The story in itself is pretty out there. I wanted to see what people think of it, before moving on to any big-picture ultimate conclusions I might have about it.
Malicious in the sense that they're driven by their fetish rather than finding the best standards of care, yes.
Ok, and from my side: if something in what I wrote is unclear, can you just ask what I meant, so I can clarify it, instead of complaining about the original post 9 comment levels deep?
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This has been out there for months without gathering any attention outside of fringe right wing press like The Economist. It's been labeled a conspiracy to be ignored and sneered at, as it will be here. You don't have the power to confront them with it, so they can just pretend it's not happening until it's time to say "and it's good!"
Unsurprisingly, kiwifarms has all the deets and complete archives of their "research," which decisively answer all the deflection being done in this thread.
It is the first I'm hearing about it as someone quite online, I think it's worth bringing up.
It's really amazing how flaccid the response was, isn't it? You'd think people would be screaming it from the rooftops, but it's like everyone's too demoralized to protest even the most deranged things being done to their children any more.
The most common response I saw on Twitter was saying "well, obviously this was the next step. We all saw it coming, but what's changed to make anyone listen this time?"
We (as in society, because I sure as hell haven't) accepted that sex was a private matter and what people did in the privacy of their bedrooms, or their imaginations, was no business of anyone else and certainly not the government.
We accepted that any and every sexual orientation was as legitimate and normal as default cis-heteronormativity.
We accepted that kink-shaming was bad, and fetishes were healthy expressions and explorations of sexuality.
We accepted that trans was real woman/real man and anyone who thought otherwise was a transphobe who probably engaged in the worst sin of sins, misgendering and deadnaming.
We accepted that kids could be and were sexual beings too, so contraception and abortion where necessary.
We accepted that kids could make informed decisions, just like adults, about their sexual orientation and gender identity.
We accepted that only religious zealots, bigots, haters, and slavering right-wing fascists objected to any of the above, and wanted to put limits on it because they hate women and minorities and want to control them.
So yeah, eunuch-identity as one more letter for the LGBTQ2+/LGBTQIA+ acronym is just the next step. There will probably be a new flag for them for next Pride. And yeah, eunuch-identity for trans kids, because what are you, some kind of hater? Don't you know about the 41%?
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Not exactly an original notion, but I'm always amazed at the power of the label "conspiracy theory" and the ineffectiveness of responding, "yes, this is a theory about a conspiracy".
Calm down, it is not conspiracy when everything is in the open.
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Yeah, I know it's old news, but I don't remember anyone bringing it up here. And if someone wants to call it a conspiracy theory, I'm very interested in their reasoning.
I think the only way you'll even get that response is by posting this as a direct reply. Otherwise it's just the usual tactic of "ignore, except to subtweet about the stench of evil right wing bare links posts getting worse"
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