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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   34055 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle

There are. Hello! AMA! (I'm not trans myself, just very, very committed on this issue.)

Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?

It depends on what you mean by "bad actors" and "slippery slopes".

When you say "bad actors": are we talking about cis perverts pretending to be trans? About trans women pretending to be be cis women? About trans women who are genuinely trans, insofar as that means anything, but for whom it's more of a sex thing than they admit?

The liar in the breastfeeding story sounds like an example of a genuine bad actor of the second type. Lying bad. Hot take, I know. But that's just it: the problem with that behavior was the lying. The 'taking advantage's of people's sympathy on false pretenses'. The fact that the pervert was lying about biological sex is incidental. An infertile cis woman lying about having lost a child would be just as scandalous, to me. And more to the point, while I haven't been following the story very closely, I don't see what it has in common with the Zizians. They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here. Not that it matters.

And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime. Calling the moral brigade because someone somewhere might be having Dirty Thoughts about a woman is rightly derided as one of the worst excesses of a certain brand of feminism: this should apply here too. Yes, being perceived as a sexy woman is a sex thing for some trans women. (Not all of them; I know many trans women who are straight-up asexual. But a good number.) …So? Men aren't asked if they're foot fetishists before they're allowed on beaches where women go barefoot. Women who take men to task for the suspicion that the men are imagining them with their clothes off, even if the men in question don't make a single suggestive remark, are universally viewed as crazy puritans by anyone who doesn't share their neuroses. Let trans women jerk off about being trans women in the privacy of their own home, if they're not being indecent in public it's their own business. The mothers in the Facebook group chat have a perfectly valid grievance about being lied to, but whether the liar's motive was sexual or not in the privacy of their own mind, won't magically change the level of harm if the 'victims' couldn't tell at the time.

The dirty thoughts (that they are women even with male genitalia) lead to harm. It normalized men being allowed in intimate spaces reserved for women like bathrooms and changing rooms. It’s decimating women’s sports as women are no longer good enough to compete at high levels of sports leagues if men are allowed to declare themselves women. These harm women. Men in women’s sports basically closes off a major source of scholarships for women, particularly minority women, and to the degree that they need those scholarships to make college affordable, they’re now shut out. And men being allowed in women’s changing rooms and restrooms enables rape. A man looking to rape women can hang about women’s changing rooms for as long as he likes, so long as he claims to be female. The only point at which women might object is if he actually tries to rape them. At which point, it’s too late.

Thanks for taking questions! I would like to understand better if/where you draw the boundary of your principles.

  • Somebody else already brought up transracialism in a different subthread, but that discussion went nowhere. What about a very concrete scenario: a Caucasian-American person demands to be identified as African-American, including addressing "other" African-Americans using everyone's favourite n-word? Can they demand equal treatment and claim a university scholarship set aside for African-Americans? If you don't like these, does it make a difference if the individual was adopted by African-American parents and raised in a homogeneous African-American community?

  • @Bartender_Venator's examples here: what about titles of honour for a head of state that you don't respect, or even actively look down on? What about homeopaths or faith healers wanting to be addressed as Doctor? Imagine in the latter case that they would be genuinely hurt and feel that a core part of their identity is being rejected if you didn't do so.

The reason these examples are particularly relevant is that to many people who are uncomfortable with trans language norms, the demands register as similar to the latter because they consider women to be a socially privileged class, and non-women asking to be treated as women are therefore people arrogating themselves a status they do not have. (That's why nobody is ever upset about transmen, except in a "these are women being duped into harming themselves" capacity)

This suggests a class of "bad actors" that you did not address: men who only want to be identified as women for material and social benefits. Material benefits can simply take the form of hiring priority (at least in academia the handful of individuals I know who went trans in grad school wound up significantly beating the curve in terms of subsequent employment), and social benefits can either be an expectation of some of the social benefits enjoyed by biological women, or a pure power play as you can force people to walk on eggshells around you, or make them uncomfortable (if they have the common adverse reaction) but incapable of voicing or acting upon their discomfort due to the threat of severe sanction.

(If you think that the existence of such bad actors is unlikely, we probably have very different priors on the prevalence of male sociopathy.)

I wonder how much overlap there is between the discussion on gendered pronouns and the discussion on common names for substitute foods.

the problem with that behavior was the lying.

Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.

Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.

I don't think this is truly people's objection, whatever else they may say.

I think there are a ton of cases where a fuzzy boundary, usually corresponding to some biological reality, gets bridged with an honorary status. Whether it is adoption of children creating honorary blood relations, or conversion to ethnoreligions like the ex-Muslim Vaishnavite convert Haridasa Thakur or the Biblical Ruth's adoption of Jewish customs and ways.

I think the "adoption" model (which I've sometimes called the "socio-legal sex" model) of trans people is the closest to being an accurate statement of the reality of trans people, and it has the advantage of not requiring any dubious metaphysics. A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child. Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality - they are intersubjective facts about human social relationships and (potentially) associated legal structures

There is no lie in saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son" any more than there is a lie in saying "The United States has 50 states" or any number of other intersubjective human-created "truths." Of course, with these kinds of truths, there will always be room for rivalrous claims. If I say, "There is no King of England", then depending on what I mean by that, I could be saying a perfectly "true" fact. (For example, if I was an anarchist, and didn't regard any monarchical claim as valid.)

I mean, I don't really object to other people making whatever honourary or even dubious claims make them happy, including you -- the current state of trans-affairs is more like your anarchist going around getting people fired for considering themselves subjects of the King. Or monarchists forcing the anarchists to pledge fealty every morning before work; also bad.

Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality

Claiming someone is "adopted" is a falsifiable claim about an event that occurred in reality. Unless your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "adoption", the so-called "fuzzy boundary" of what constitutes adoption is beyond the horizon of normal parlance.

Claiming someone is "a woman" has been, for the overwhelming majority of the term's historical usage, a falsifiable claim about someone's sex. Unless your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "a woman", the so-called "fuzzy boundary" of what constitutes a woman has previously been beyond the horizon of normal parlance.

In both cases, the obvious evidence that these words mean something closely reflecting reality is that mislabeling someone is somewhere between a joke and an insult. The accidental category error is so uncommon that deliberate category error is a meaningful signal in communication.

The transgender memeplex wants to expand the usage of the word "woman" to include unfalsifiable claims about someone's internal mental state. If your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "a woman", your job is now by definition completely arbitrary: how is it possible to draw the distinction, other than to fully accept or deny the dubious metaphysics that allows anyone to be anything in their imagination? For all other parlance, the meaning of "woman" is now decoupled from centuries of ordinary usage - this is less of a "fuzzy boundary" creeping in, and more a total erasure of the fundamental falsifiable claim at the heart of the word. In spite of all this, the transgender memeplex expects to inherit both the insult of mislabeling (without also inheriting the objective distinctions that made this mislabeling insulting in the first place) and the legal and social statuses and carve-outs for whichever sex is most convenient to their whims.

There's a clear, obvious distinction between the usage of words that make concrete claims about reality (but for a handful of exotic edge cases no one ever thinks about), and the usage of words in the transgender memeplex that erodes centuries of colloquial understanding in favor of obfuscating, homogenizing, and booby-trapping the terminology with definitions based on unfalsifiable internal mental states. I wouldn't call the latter "lying" per se, but I don't blame the average Joe for pattern matching demands for uncritical acceptance of unfalsifiable claims that overwrite common sense to something very close to "lying", particularly when these demands are brazenly accompanied by power grabs and political maneuvering. Motives aside, I think a lot of people instinctively consider anyone deploying this kind of rhetorical trickery to be either crazy or up to no good, and deny it legitimacy by refusing to participate.

I think that the terminology problem that arises here is the difference between social truths and mind-independent truths about reality.

If I was speaking colloquially, I would allow social truths to be called "objective" in some sense. But I think there is a difference between a sentence like "The speed limit here is 75 miles per hour", and "The sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium." The first is referring to an intersubjective agreement about a rule in society, and the second is a fact that even Martians could discover about the universe.

In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independeng facts about reality (objective.)

I think these sentences are mind-independent truths:

  • Adoptive children are not the biological offspring of their adoptive parents. Augustus is not the son of Caesar.
  • Trans women belong to the class of people who produce small, mobile gametes. Trans women are biological men.

But they are completely compatible with the social truths:

  • Adoptive children are the children of their adoptive parents. Augustus is the son of Caesar.
  • Trans people are honorary members of their identified sex. Trans women are women.

I agree that social truths lend themselves to falsification. If I make a move in chess, it is either legal or it is not. But chess is not a mind-independent part of the universe that a Martian scientist could just discover "out there." It exists as a set of intersubjective agreements between humans, who agree to abide by the rules of chess.

So too, every society decides the rules by which they judge the validity of adoption and honorary sex transition. The Islamic world rejects the concept of "adoption", replacing it with a legal construct of "guardianship" with different implications for inheritance, for example. "Adoption" is not a legal move in the game of Islamic jurisprudence.

Right now, honorary sex transition is in a state of flux - finding acceptance among some in the Western world, and rejection among others. People are playing different games, and may or may not converge on a single game some day.

In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independent facts about reality (objective.)

Right, because in most everyday conversation, we don't need to. The mind-independent facts about "adoption" and "women" have historically been well-correlated with the usage of the words in subjective or intersubjective contexts, independent of the society in question.

Islam has a different intersubjective analogue ("guardianship") for something that correlates with the same mind-independent facts about "adoption". No one considers this "lying", it's just different societal rules for the same fact pattern.

The transgender memeplex attempts to redefine the meaning of the intersubjective "woman" in a way that completely divorces the terms from the existing correlation with the objective "woman". Is this lying? No, it's just changing the rules about using one of the most common words in everyday parlance to render it objectively meaningless, such that it's indistinguishable from lying to anyone using the old intersubjective rules; while also expecting everyone to honor the inherited intersubjective rules about mislabeling, special interests, etc. that only exist because of the now-deprecated objective meaning; except now those inherited intersubjective rules should apply to subjective, unobservable mind states we can all change on a whim.

Again, while I don't think the average person will put it in those terms, they can probably notice the "lie by the old rules" part and the political maneuvering one step behind it, conclude that this is a scam, and refuse to engage.

A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child.

By this reasoning you should accept transracial people.

Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time. Light brown-skinned Hispanic people are increasingly identifying as just "white" in the United States and their voting behavior is becoming more correlated with assimilated white Americans, for example. There's a long history of things like blanqueamiento in the Latin American world.

I think there are a few basic levels of intersubjective truth claims:

  • Tier 1: Things some group of people (perhaps as small as a single family, or a friend group) believe.
  • Tier 2: Things a slightly larger group like a tribe or subculture believe.
  • Tier 3: Things larger groups like a nation or civilization believe.
  • Tier 4: Things that transcend tribe or nation in some way.

Trans people might arguably be at the level of Tier 2 - if one is willing to talk about "progressives" as a tribe. So far as I know, transracial people in the Rachel Dolezal style are still at Tier 1. These tiers aren't about making a thing "more true" - since I think social "truths" like "dollars have value", "The United States exists", or "So-and-so is the true king" are all operating more at the level of fiction. If you want to be nitpicky, I think they could all be called false in a strict sense, in the same way that saying something like, "Harry Potter is a wizard" is false - there is no such person as Harry Potter, and no such thing as wizards. But everyone who knows how to speak and use words also knows that "Harry Potter is a wizard" is a more felicitous sentence than "Harry Potter is a fire-breathing dragon."

Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time. Light brown-skinned Hispanic people are increasingly identifying as just "white" in the United States and their voting behavior is becoming more correlated with assimilated white Americans, for example.

We're talking about anyone being able to arbitrarily choose their race at any given moment, though.

From a "race is a social construct" perspective, isn't this just code switching? Presumably scoped here to people who ambiguously pass as either.

Do I get Affirmative Action benefits, if I code switch?

It worked for Elizabeth Warren.

I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment, any more than I've endorsed the view that you can just adopt an orphaned child at any given moment. I think in most cases and with most social groups, honorary statuses will require some kind of "social proof" for a group to accept them. In the case of adoption, it might look like filling out a bunch of forms with the government. In the case of trans people, it might look like paying $50 at your DMV to get your sex indicators changed on your driver's license.

The "social proof" doesn't have to involve the government, though that is usually the "easiest" path since it means that the people with the ability to enforce contracts through their monopoly on force recognize your claim as legitimate. However, if a national disaster created a 10 year state of anarchy, I think people in a community that already believed in the basic legitimacy of child adoption could have informal adoption with enough social proof that most of the people in a community recognized the validity of the claim.

I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment

But it very clearly is the view that is being pushed throughout societies. There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency. It's all fine and well that you might not support it, but you can't act like you're steelmanning a view, when that's clearly not the view being put forward.

There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency.

Could you point me in the direction of these laws? Do they allow you to self-ID without letting anyone know until you're called on it, or do they require you to file paperwork with the government still? Because filing paperwork is still a form of social proof in my book.

More comments

I'm aware, but, for a couple of reasons that isn't a position I have a lot of respect for; sorry if the following two-point reply is a bit on the curt side.

  • First, because it relies on a kind of obtuse definition of "lying" that breaks down completely as soon as you look at, for example, non-binary people. If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.

  • Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

  • -15

Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line

Rule of thumb: if something only affects consenting adults, it is no business of mine.

(Sidenote: my actual internal rule of thumb is a little more subtle than this, including the self-referential social contract definition to attempt to address the paradox of tolerance. Not relevant in this particular situation.)

Elaborating on these cases:

a man getting bottom surgery

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.

breast implants

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.
[n.b. said rule of thumb does not apply about demands to affect those who are not consenting adults]

estrogen shots

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.

wearing dresses

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.
[n.b. said rule of thumb does not apply about demands to affect those who are not consenting adults]

renaming himself 'Alice'

Depends on what precisely is meant by this.

If this means 'private chats between consenting adults refer to said person by the moniker Alice', this affects only consenting adults, and as such is no business of mine.
If this means 'publicly wishes to be known by the moniker Alice', this is on the borderline of said rule of thumb. I tend to lean towards saying this rule of thumb does not apply; I can see arguments either way and so tend to err on the side of stating this is no business of mine regardless.
If this means 'demands to be known only by the moniker Alice', this affects those who are not consenting adults, and as such said rule of thumb does not apply.

demands to be addressed as 'she'

This affects those who are not consenting adults, and as such said rule of thumb does not apply.

N.B. Do not conflate 'said rule of thumb does not apply' with ''should not be allowed'.
N.B. Do not conflate 'is no business of mine' with 'is endorsed'.
N.B. Do not conflate 'do not conflate A and B' with 'A implies not B'
N.B. In general, do not conflate A implies B with !A implies !B.
N.B. In general, do not conflate A implies B with B implies A.

I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

I'm curious: what portion of the above axiom and implications thereof do you not believe could be serious, and why?

Yes, nonbinary is lying, because nonbinary is not real.

Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement. The basis of liberalism (real liberalism, not the recent US perversion of the word) is "you do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt me; I do what I want as long as it doesn't hurt you". All of the first five things fall under "you do what you want"; the last one is denying "I do what I want".

If you think liberalism is insane, well, okay, glad we understand each other. If you think it's in the minority, eh, you're probably right, which is sad, but it's hardly "only a few contrarians".

...I do also have a point to make which is kind of awkward, because I find the entire form of the argument to be invalid and ordinarily assiduously avoid making it, but which might be somewhat more compelling to you.

Specifically, autism.

See, the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide. Here's the problem: autistics are often psychologically damaged by being forced to say things they think are "wrong", including invalid additions to closed-class words like pronouns, and obviously simple falsehoods. I'm not saying I never lie, but we're talking literally three times in the last fifteen years, and on all three occasions I literally had cause to believe someone could be murdered if I didn't tell the lie. And I remember the effort knocking me around badly on at least one of those occasions - another knocked me around badly in general, as you might expect from a life-and-death situation, but I'm a bit hazy on how much the lie contributed. I am fairly certain that my mental health would go down the toilet if I were forced to do this on a regular basis; the last time I had to suppress my nature (although in a slightly-different way) in the long-term, I literally wound up attacking my mother with a duvet while stark naked (and the split personality took about a decade to fully wither).

So. Now we're at an impasse; the exact rationale for enforcing pronouns also demands that we don't enforce pronouns. I don't see any consistent rule that allows ignoring the autistic problem but not the trans problem; autism is at least as much of an immutable characteristic (NB: I'm ex-trans myself), autistic mental health outcomes also suck horribly, and prevalence rates are similar. SJ prioritises one over the other, but as far as I can tell that's just because at least since GamerGate SJ finds central examples of autists unsympathetic and doesn't care what happens to us.

As I said, I find this argument's entire form objectionable; I reject these sorts of arguments entirely, because they result in paradoxes like this one and more generally cause massive headaches for everyone. I don't ask for special accommodations for being autistic; yes, loud noise bothers the hell out of me, but I solve that with earmuffs rather than requiring others to remove the noise, because it's a me problem and not an everyone problem. But you seem to find these sorts of arguments a bit more compelling than I do, so I might as well point out the issue.

EDIT: Okay, one of the times I lied (and the time I clearly remember being a crying mess afterward), what I was afraid of would AIUI technically have been manslaughter, not murder. I don't think this has much relevance to the point at issue, though.

 This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement

Not in my experience. Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.

the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide.

It's not really my basic reasoning for this, FWIW.

But also, at an epistemological level, I simply don't grant that using a trans person's preferred pronouns constitutes "lying". Like I said elsewhere in this thread, it doesn't involve communicating any untrue belief about physical reality. When I say "this trans women is, socially, within the object-class for which we use the pronoun she" I am not telling you she has a uterus any more than I'd be telling you a sailing ship had a uterus if I told you "traditionally, seafaring vessels are referred to with the pronoun she". If calling a wooden floating object anything but an 'it' bothers you for the same reason, well, I'm sorry for you, but so it goes.

Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.

I would be interested to see if this was still the case if we had fully-reversible medical transitions.
I would be also interested to see if this was still the case if we had Clarketech-style indistinguishable-except-with-specialized-medical-tech medical transitions.

Here's hoping that I'll be able to see the answer to at least one of these questions within my lifetime...

If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.

You are telling me to pretend to believe that you are neither man nor woman, when in fact you are obviously one or the other.

If a white person said that they didn't want to be described as "white" but rather "devoid of race", people who indulged them in this would be lying.

"Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.

This is untrue. It requires acknowledgement of the ideological concept of non-binary genders, of gender itself, and of an entire sociological theory. How may someone who entirely rejects this concept address this hypothetical you, provided they also don't believe you are owed self declared titles?

treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed

Some people believe in:

  1. The political concept of Free Speech as classically understood, which includes the prevention of compelled declarations
  2. That lying (hereby defined as professing something you do not believe) is morally impermissible

Lest we are ready to call the adherents of the most popular religion in the world "contrarians", these do not seem like small objections to the concept of introducing mandatory political forms of address in everyday life.

Indeed this was already a point of contention when French and Russian Revolutionaries made similar demands. With similar motivations, I might add.

I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

Then you've just had your fingers in your ears for a decade whilst Jordan Peterson was yelling explanations so loudly he hurt himself. What did you think the opposition to C-16 was about in Canada exactly? Did you care to listen to the opponents at all?

People in the West are generally fine with you doing whatever the fuck you want to yourself and pretty much anything to other consenting adults. Where they tend to object is when you make demands of them.

And well, requiring that someone act against their conscience is generally regarded as a violation of their natural rights.

You can wear all the dresses, have the surgeries and call yourself whatever you want. You just can't demand that your uncle Edward be jailed or lose his job because he disapproves and refuses to engage with the charade in principle. That's all.

This is untrue. It requires acknowledgement of the ideological concept of non-binary genders, of gender itself, and of an entire sociological theory.

I don't think it does, any more than I have to believe in God to address a nun as 'Sister So-and-so' rather than 'Mrs'. Which I guess may be what you meant by "being owed self-declared titles". I guess I bite that bullet. If it doesn't imply lying about actual physical reality then I support a social norm that you should call people what they want to be called, in general, or else not interact with them at all.

Though I also have a more pointed objection. I don't think I have any different beliefs about object-level reality than you do regarding 'gender'. This sort of thing gets very twisty with how self-referential it all is, but genuinely, my only factual belief about the 'ze' person is 'they like it when I call zir ze, and ze doesn't like if I call zir a she'. This is an observable fact about zir behavior, which you can observe as easily as I; and it is literally all I mean if I tell you 'zir gender is non-binary'.

(We might have a value disagreement about whether it's bad to go against zir wishes; we might have a political disagreement about whether it's good for society to have lots of non-binary people in it. But when I say 'that guy over there is non-binary', as a statement about the world, I truly don't think you factually disagree with any part of what I mean by that sentence. So I wouldn't be asking you to lie if I asked you to repeat it.)

Referring to a nun as Sister Mary other saint's name of religious concept does not imply anything about the truth of the Catholic faith. Addressing her as Miss Birthname would probably take some research; addressing her as Mrs would be lying because she is not married.

I say 'that guy over there is non-binary', as a statement about the world, I truly don't think you factually disagree with any part of what I mean by that sentence.

Yes I do. That guy is a guy. He might not be a man, depending on how rigidly you define it, but he's not 'outside the gender binary' because that is a thing that only exists for severe birth defects and usually prefers the term 'intersex'. He's probably some kind of faggot or squirrelly guy, but he is still a guy. You can't opt out of your gender.

Yes I do.

No you don't. Ze is a biological male. I agree with this, you agree with this. When I tell you "ze is non-binary" I am saying "ze dislikes being described as he or a man in social contexts", which is a true fact about this person's behavior, as apparent to you as it is to me. The sentence is only a lie if you interpret "non-binary" as meaning "physically intersex" which is not what I understand the word to mean in that sentence, nor, for that matter, how anybody else defines it.

You might as well say that I'm lying when I say "this person is a red-head" because you insist on only applying that word to someone whose entire head is painted cherry-red, rather than someone with orange hair. You can come up with a strained argument for this being the literal meaning of the phrase if you showed it to a space alien, but it's not what anybody who uses the word means by it. (Or, for an even closer example: if I tell you "this guy is a furry", are you going to insist that this is a lie, because he's only wearing a suit, and doesn't have literal fur? No. Regardless of your opinions on whether either is an advisable lifestyle choice, "nonbinary" is a perfectly good descriptor for a certain type of person as defined by their behavior, just like "furry" is.)

If you've got another non-derogatory descriptive word for "person who dislikes being called a man and wants to be addressed as a ze", I'm all ears. But I think "non-binary" is a perfectly good descriptive term which people are unlikely to misunderstand as being in reference to a hormonal condition.

I can simply call him a guy, which is a true statement. He can dislike being a guy all he wants, but he can't change it, any more than I can change into a redhead by insisting upon it(I could dye my hair of course, but being male/female is rather more fundamental).

I'm not sure what behavior you're referencing- we have a non-derogatory word for males who engage in effeminate behavior: metrosexual. They're still guys.

I can simply call him a guy, which is a true statement.

I'm not arguing that it would be untrue of you to call zir a guy; I'm saying it wouldn't be a lie to call zir non-binary. Very different. (Compare: this guy is a furry/this guy is a Homo sapiens.)

I'm not sure what behavior you're referencing

That ze is liable to tell you that ze is non-binary, refer to themself as a "ze" or a "Mx", wave a yellow-white-purple-black flag around, dress ambiguously, not want to hang out with to you if you insist on calling zir "Sir" or "Ma'am", and so on. When I tell you someone "is nonbinary", that is what I am telling you; it's not rocket science, and it's not synonymous with the information I'd be conveying if I told you a guy was metrosexual.

More comments

any more than I have to believe in God to address a nun as 'Sister So-and-so' rather than 'Mrs'.

So absolutely then.

In countries that recognize a right to Free Speech, you are under no obligation to recognize any Church's titles as legitimate. What addresses are acceptable or appropriate in what context is a relatively common sticking point of inter-faith dialogue, actually.

If it doesn't imply lying about actual physical reality then I support a social norm that you should call people what they want to be called, in general, or else not interact with them at all.

Well I for one respect the blood of those who fought to abolish that social norm.

I don't think I have any different beliefs about object-level reality than you do regarding 'gender'.

I mean I don't believe that gender exists, so I'm not sure that's true. But regardless of our agreement, truth is not limited to such matters. Otherwise freedom of religion would be impossible.

People can want to be called any and all manner of things, that doesn't give them any right to preempt me choosing my own words to think about and describe the world.

The best concession you're going to get is that if it's easier to do something, people may choose to do it out of politeness. But neopronouns have never been easier than anything.

In countries that recognize a right to Free Speech, you are under no obligation to recognize any Church's titles as legitimate

Under no legal obligation. But it would still be the polite thing to do if you ran into a nun at the grocery store. There is a very great difference between laws and social norms. I believe we should have a social norm of using trans people's preferred pronouns; I do not think it should be a crime not to. I am in favor of a world where journalists typically use a trans person's preferred pronouns if they're writing a piece about them, as opposed to a world where they typically do the reverse - I am not saying I want journalists to be legally mandated to write the story either way.

I mean I don't believe that gender exists, so I'm not sure that's true

I don't know what sort of 'gender' you don't believe exists, but I promise, I very probably don't believe in it either.

A nun you ran into at the grocery store would be perfectly fine being addressed with 'how do you do ma'am'. Sister is a title replacing 'miss'.

But it would still be the polite thing to do if you ran into a nun at the grocery store.

My grandmother is and always has been a card carrying member of our communist party. She is also very involved in her local community and great friends with the local priest, pastor and rabbi. Yet she has made a point to never use their titles in conversation (opiate of the masses you understand).

Given this has never stopped her from carrying business in good company, I'm not sure I buy the need for such a norm. And frankly it's my belief that politeness is something that is to be negotiated between individuals rather than imposed by some rational rule.

I'm fine with journalists using whatever language they desire, and for people to tell them they are right or wrong to do so either way.

Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.

Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line?

Yes?

None of the other stuff impacts me in the slightest; it's (aspirationally) a free country. "Demands to be addressed as she" is maybe the least sticky of the demands that are being made IRL, but it's still sticky enough.

Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.

Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom. No one is asking you to pretend that a single cell in that person's body is arranged differently than you believe it to be. Your beliefs about physical reality are perfectly aligned with the 'ze's. You have a disagreement about social norms but the trans person isn't asking you to lie about what you believe to be the ground-level truth. I brought up the non-binary thing because in the case of e.g. a trans woman, you can kinda sorta argue that you're being asked to act-as-though this person has a vagina, even if you're not being asked to believe that they really physically do. But a non-binary person? There's nothing there.

  • -10

Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom.

You can't fathom people believing that there is no such thing as a third gender? I don't know what to tell you; AMA I guess.

You can't fathom people believing that there is no such thing as a third gender?

I can't fathom that people can only parse "Alice is non-binary" as "Alice belongs to an objectively real third gender that abstractly exists" (a falsifiable claim about the world, and thus, a lie if you don't think it's true) rather than "Alice identifies as non-binary" (an undeniable objective fact about Alice's behavior and therefore not a lie whether or not you think Alice ought to be non-binary).

I don't care what Alice identifies at -- I identify Alice as a woman or a man, and referring to him/her otherwise would be untrue.

What if I don't believe in this novel conception of social norms?

What if I asked you to not use any gendered pronouns at all and to use "comrade" instead in every occurence? Would you not have any objection based on your own belief system?

Telling the truth is not limited to truths that pertain to material reality. As it happens.

Drawing your attention to my comment to @WandererintheWilderness here.

What if I asked you to not use any gendered pronouns at all and to use "comrade" instead in every occurrence? Would you not have any objection based on your own belief system?

Not really, no. I would find it cumbersome, and, as a result, I'd probably try and avoid having to talk about you at all. But if I absolutely had to write about you, particularly somewhere you or another comradegender person could see it, I'd honor your request.

Language is an adaptive compression and error-correction algorithm on concepts over a lossy channel, give or take.

And indeed there is a lot of overlap between English and an entropy code with a preshared dictionary. (Not perfect by any means - English is complicated!) Pick a number of output symbols, pack your common concepts into short combinations of output symbols and your less common concepts into longer combinations of output symbols, and go from there.

Every input symbol in an entropy encoding has an optimum length of output symbol(s) based on the input symbol probabilities. Pick an output that is longer, and the encoding will be less efficient on average. But also: pick an output that is shorter, and the encoding will be less efficient on average too! This is because making the output encoding for that particular symbol shorter requires making the output encodings for other symbol(s) longer in a way that results in a less efficient encoding overall.

English's error correction and detection is largely in the form of sentence structure and (commonly) using only a relatively small portion of the potential space of all spoken syllables (or letters, in the case of written text. For instance, you were able to reed this sentence regardless of my typo, due to 'reed' being far less likely to refer to the plant in context than to a mis-spelling of 'read').

English speakers tend to adapt their language to channel capacity too, using simpler and more distinct words and concepts when e.g. in the presence of high amounts of background noise. Ditto, English speakers have a tendency to have a reasonable grasp of 'unusual' words, and when one is encountered will often slow down, repeat, or otherwise be careful about saying it as a hint of 'yes, this is in fact what I meant to say, not an inadvertent error'. (The fact that this overlaps substantially with 'unusual words tend to be practiced less' is very helpful here!)

You even have adaptive encoding. Jargon is precisely noting that a concept comes up a lot and so assigning a shorter nickname to it in context. Ditto things like short nicknames and first names versus full names. Use the short form when it is unambiguous in context, and otherwise use the longer (but unambiguous) version. Even pronouns are themselves just shorter references to a particular person (or set of people) when it can be inferred from context as opposed to repeatedly stated.

Now let's come back to names.

If you demand you must be referred to by, oh, the word 'and'. What have you done?

Well, first off you've just decreed that the preshared dictionary for everyone be updated to include you as a definition for the word 'and'. This is a minor cost for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion. At least it is a one-time cost (...it is a one-time cost, right?)

Second, you've just made the handshake process more annoying for everyone. Quick: what happens when I talk to someone who has not heard that you are to now be referred to as 'and'? Answer: confusion & wasted time. This is at least a cost paid no more than once per person (hopefully).

Third, you've make the 'standard' use of the word 'and' marginally more ambiguous. Again, this hurts everyone for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion.

Fourth, you've just decreed people must memorize said moniker in order to refer to you. Trivial in this case; decidedly non-trivial in others. Again, this hurts everyone for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion.

Finally - recall the above discussion re: adaptive encoding. You've decreed that there is no acceptable longer version, and as such you occupy a non-trivial portion of the space of the entire English language. In practice what happens is people ignore this and come up with increasingly convoluted workarounds. Because at the end of the day: you're probably that important to yourself. You may be that important to your closest friends (if so, you have good friends). Beyond that? You - statistically speaking with regards to the preshared dictionary that is English - are not that important. Or, more to the point: not everyone can be that important.

The same sort of thing occurs when a word has overlap with a concept that is used more frequently than your name.

And an analogous sort of thing even occurs when you pick a word that does not exist. Again: Shannon capacity. Adding a symbol does not magically break the channel capacity bound. It just makes the transmission slower, and communication overall - assuming that you are not used in context as often as the symbol length would imply - slower.

So, all of the above being said, if you're still pushing to change your moniker, what can you do?

  • Pick something that matches typical English (language not location, speaking of ambiguity) norms. This meshes with the error correction & detection better, and causes less friction.
  • Pick something that already matches the tag of . Again, this meshes with the error correction & detection better, and causes less friction.
  • Pick something that is unambiguous enough that it does not slow down other unrelated communication. So: very short names are terrible, as are names that are close to other words (especially ones that would potentially make sense in context).
  • Pick something that is simultaneously short & unsurprising enough that it is not a particular burden for others to remember, and long & surprising enough that it does not clash in the aforementioned ways. (There is a tension here!)
  • Don't complain about people using the shortform moniker for other concepts. This reduces friction for people who aren't close to you.
  • Have an unambiguous longform moniker, and allow people to use it when applicable. Again, this allows people to fall back to said longform when necessary.
  • Be permissive about what you receive. Those that are closest to you are most likely to have reason to allocate an additional chunk of their concept space to you.

...and in the context of "use "comrade" instead in every occurrence [of a gendered pronoun]" (@IGI-111):

  • This is a longer term, which hurts when talking about said person. There is a reason why 'I/my/me/he/she/him/her/his/hers/they/them/theirs' are all short: they are very common.
  • This results in many repetitions of words - which are used in English's error detection & correction for other purposes. E.g. "he himself will bear the blame" -> "comrade comrade will bear the blame".
  • This directly results in some ambiguity - English normally splits out e.g. they/them/theirs to help better-form surrounding sentence structure, which you lose by using 'comrade' for all three.
  • This causes a clash with English's error detection & correction, due to resulting in sentences that would otherwise be ungrammatical (e.g. "comrade comrade will bear the blame").
  • This is ambiguous - especially when talking to someone who has not yet heard said decree. If I am your sworn enemy, I do not want someone to think I am referring to you as a mate, companion, or associate.

In total honesty, I find tolerating that imposition incomprehensible.

Must be a cultural thing.

Right? It wasn't that long ago that asking others to call you by a nickname was cringe. It wasn't that long ago that if your name kind of sucked, people would just choose a different one for you.

They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here.

Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly. Behaviours which would rise to the level of "red flag for violent or threatening behaviour" if committed by a male person will not result in a batted eyelid if committed by a female person. You can say "we've redrawn the category boundaries such that the word 'woman' now includes certain male people (with all the propensity for violence that that implies): adjust your expectations accordingly, and it's not our fault if you erroneously assumed that this person referred to as 'she' was female and didn't think she posed a threat as a result". But let's be real: 90% of people (99% of non-extremely online people) hear "she" and think "female person", and assume that said person is exactly as prone to committing an act of violence as any other female person (which is to say, not very). Even if the person is familiar with the tenets of gender ideology and knows that the category "woman" includes some tiny proportion of male people, they will assume that any person referred to as "she" is a female person unless they have good reason to believe otherwise. The fact that one tiny corner of human society has redrawn category boundaries in order to use the word "woman" in a nonstandard way doesn't change the expectations 90% of people have about people who are referred to using the pronoun "she", and no one is more aware of this than bad actors looking to get away with bad behaviour.

If an article about the Zizians includes a photo of LaSota, it will be obvious that LaSota is male, and people will update their expectations about LaSota's behaviour, threat level and risk calculus accordingly. But many articles about the Zizians do not include any photos of LaSota (I only found out what they looked like earlier this week). Likewise people talking about the story on the radio or on podcasts. So an article which says "LaSota says that she thinks so-and-so... she was last seen crossing the border into Mexico on [date]" will be interpreted by a significant proportion of its readerbase as an article about an uncontroversially female person who poses no more threat than any other uncontroversially female person. Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man. (Never mind native Anglophones who are unfamiliar with the finer points of gender ideology; what about non-native English speakers to whom the term "trans woman" means nothing?) If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.

Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.

Please use more paragraph breaks, it was a challenge to make my way through this.

Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man.

I have hope that this will sort itself out through better education and general osmosis at about the same rate that the "use a trans person's preferred pronouns" social norm will spread. In the meantime, if we think it's relevant, I'm fine with saying "LaSota, born male…", calling her "biologically male", or whatever.

If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.

Okay, but... I don't think über-progressive journalists are actually fully cognizant of that fact. The 'people may interpet trans woman backwards' thing, in particularly, is so deeply at odds with progressive vernacular that it genuinely doesn't register. I'm aware of it intellectually, which is more than most, but still hadn't thought of it in relation to this question until you brought it up! 'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.

Above all else, though:

Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly.

This is where you lose me from the start. The premise fundamentally repels me. I cannot and will not subscribe to this rad-fem-descended idea that being a biological male is some sort of dreadful disease so potentially dangerous to bystanders that you inherently harm them by keeping your maleness from them. Men aren't fucking werewolves. I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.

Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines. "This person is a man" isn't some all-important piece of information that the public absolutely must know about some weird cult-leader who escaped to Mexico. No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.

Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes. Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges? (You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?

To me, complaining about the potential ambiguity of 'she/her'-ing Ziz LaSota isn't like taking Clinton to task for being a smartass about the meaning of "sexual relations". It'd be like taking him to task for off-handedly mentioning he used to play "football" in the same public address without clarifying that he meant soccer and not American football. Yeah sure a lot of listeners might get the wrong idea, so what.

  • -13

Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way.

I just want to circle back to this point. Please consider the implications of your claim. "This person is a violent murderer who is experiencing confusion about their sexual/gender identity, and who led a cult which employed abusive tactics and coercive control to keep members in line. But it's none of the public's business to know whether or not this person is physically capable of committing penetrative rape, or is a member of the sex which is responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of sex crimes." With all due respect, do you hear yourself?

'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.

I'll note that the goalposts seemed to shift very quickly from "the way journalists are phrasing this isn't obscuring the facts" to "okay, the way journalists are phrasing this is obscuring the facts, but it came from a place of ignorance rather than from a conscious intention to mislead their readers".

I disagree, however: I think trans activists and progressive journalists know exactly how unpopular their preferred policies are with the general public, and are fully aware that they can only get them into legislation under cover of darkness. This explains their annoying habit of labelling their opponents as "transphobic", "TERF" etc. without explicitly stating what their opponents' opinions are.

I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.

The fact that there's so much overlap between the grievances aired by "trans women" and the grievances aired by sophomoric MRAs is further evidence for my conclusion that I'm looking at the same picture.

Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines.

What? Are you seriously arguing that only the strongest men are more muscular than women, on average?

Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes.

I agree, Ziz's transness is not relevant to their crimes (except insofar as having their delusions reinforced and encouraged by all and sundry in their vicinity may have contributed to their cultish megalomania). The fact that Ziz is male is relevant to their crimes, given male people's greater propensity and capability for violence.

No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.

On the contrary - I think there are a great many people who think (not unreasonably, given the massive strength differentials between the sexes) that if they were threatened by a female escaped murderer, they would be capable of subduing her with relative ease. Thus, referring to Ziz using language which strongly implies that they are female is misleading and not in the public interest.

There's also the very real possibility that, depending on the jurisdiction, Ziz will be recorded as a female murderer and cult leader, as is already policy in many parts of the West. This will obviously hamper criminologists' ability to understand crime offending patterns in the future, if the data is contaminated by the presence of male offenders in the female dataset. Claim that you aren't in favour of that all you want - it's the logical endpoint of the worldview you're espousing.

Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges?

"Fractionally", "vaguely correlated", as if we're just talking about 105 male murderers for every 100 female. Meanwhile, back in Planet Reality, male people are responsible for just shy of 90% of murders in the US. Most men are not murderers, but most murderers are men. Trans activists (including the minority on this very website) sometimes like to act like they're so noble and heroic like "why on earth would I care about the genitals of a stranger?", thereby implying that anyone who expresses any desire to know about a stranger's sex is some kind of pervert (because they themselves are so pornsick that they can't conceive of wanting to know this information for reasons other than sexual gratification). Actually, it's perfectly simple: if a woman is walking home alone and she notices a stranger walking a hundred yards behind her, if she knows that that stranger is male (regardless of how they "identify", because violent crime rates track sex and not gender identity), she thereby knows, right off the bat, that the stranger in question is 9 times more likely to murder her than if the stranger is female. This is extremely useful information for a woman to have to carry out her risk calculus - but women making generalisations about male people hurts your feelings, so you think a murderer and cult leader's sex is none of the public's business. Okay.

As @zackmdavis argues, The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions. We have a category called "man" and a category called "woman". Before gender ideology was a thing, we knew that the members of the category "man" were vastly more likely to commit violence than members of the category "woman". Then someone invented gender ideology and argued that some of the people who would have once been included in the category "man" ought really to have been included in the category "woman". We investigated this, and determined that there was no difference in propensity to commit violence when comparing "men" with the minority of people who would traditionally have been categorised as "men" but now wanted to be categorised as "women" (and the members of the latter group were exactly as strong as any other person who would traditionally have been categorised as a man). So, from the narrow perspective of "violence-avoiding risk calculus", isn't it just abundantly obvious that the "new" definitions are just worse at this goal than the old definitions? Isn't it obvious we've substituted a fairly accurate and extremely intuitive categorisation system for a vastly less accurate and vastly less intuitive one? Isn't this just obviously bad?

(You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?

I wasn't complaining about journalists failing to mention certain traits of Ziz's which would make them more prone to criminality. If journalists published articles about the Zizians which used they/them or ze or xe etc. for every named individual, that'd be one thing. I'm complaining about journalists using language which directly implies that the individual in question is a member of a different group which has an extremely low propensity and capability for violence, when the individual in question is not a member of that group, but is rather a member of a group which has a vastly higher propensity and capability for violence.

To return to your example: supposing I was arrested for a crime, and some journalist published an article which contained the sentence "Folamh3 was a frequent poster on the website The Motte". In our counterfactual universe, themotte dot ORG is an extremely obscure website, whereas there's a much more popular website called themotte dot COM which is very pro-trans. If a journalist included this sentence in their article without disambiguating the domain name, wouldn't you think that most readers would assume the journalist was referring to themotte.com? Wouldn't you think the journalist probably knew how the sentence would be taken by most of their readers, and included it anyway? I don't really see much difference between

  • "I knew this sentence was likely to be misinterpreted by most of my readers, disambiguating it would have been a trivial matter, but I decided not to bother";
  • obfuscating the facts; and
  • lying.

So, from the narrow perspective of "violence-avoiding risk calculus", isn't it just abundantly obvious that the "new" definitions are just worse at this goal than the old definitions? Isn't it obvious we've substituted a fairly accurate and extremely intuitive categorisation system for a vastly less accurate and vastly less intuitive one? Isn't this just obviously bad?

I just don't agree that predicting violence is the main point of the man/woman binary. I guess this is Scott's Thrive/Survive dichotomy in action: I'm trying to identify the optimal social norms for generally pro-social law-abiding people to adopt among themselves to ensure their mutual happiness and fulfillment - you're trying to design the social structures that best minimize risk in a cutthroat world where you're always calculating the chance that a stranger in the street wants to gut you like a fish. I'm asking what's nicer, you're asking what's safer.

Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder. But when we're talking about principles rather than making policy, I think you need to set your sights on the ideal world, not on the making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation compromises. First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right. That's what it means for me to be a Progressive.

The experience of being weak, small, and vulnerable is a core piece of the female experience.

As a man, it can be hard to empathize. One I was on a trail in Yosemite and came across a bear. It's strange for a human male to come across a being that is unambiguously larger and more powerful than him. It was a visceral, memorable experience.

As a man, it can be hard to empathize. One I was on a trail in Yosemite and came across a bear. It's strange for a human male to come across a being that is unambiguously larger and more powerful than him.

You know there are many millions of men in the world who are significantly smaller and weaker than the upper end of the male height and strength distribution, right? Like I’m pretty sure at least 30% of adult men have encountered at least a handful of other men who are unambiguously larger and more powerful; personally, I experience this regularly, and there are plenty of guys who are even shorter and weaker than I am.

It's qualitatively different for women. They are much easier to identify and they are weaker per unit body mass. There is less ambiguity about whether or not you can win a physical contest against them. And there is a built in reason why men would WANT to risk a physical conflict with them.

My ex had lived in SF for a time. Like most SF women, she dressed in a way to hide her sexual desirability and tried as much as she could not to walk alone through the city. Unfortunately, she was somewhat good looking and you can't hide a pretty face.

Short kings are more vulnerable than guys with bodyguard physiognomy, sure. But vulnerability isn't as core a part of their experience as it is for women. For women, it runs deep. Culturally, genetically, biologically - hundreds of thousands of years of vulnerability. If you could read the biography of every one of her ancestors that passed on her mitochondria, you would read many stories of warbrides and rape. Every culture has stories about the greater vulnerability of women, because every culture has experienced it.

For a man, the worst that usually happens is that you die.

It just seems to me that you're transparently elevating one group's concerns and preferences over another. You seem to be essentially saying "it is so important that trans women feel safe and happy and 'affirmed', that I'm perfectly willing to deny women useful information that would help them to navigate an unsafe world. In fact, trans women feeling safe and 'affirmed' is so important to me that I have no problem if the policies I enact in pursuit of that goal carry the unavoidable side effect of enabling bad actors to effectively hide in plain sight."

I mean, I've long suspected that certain trans activists literally thought that trans womens' emotional comfort was more important than female people's physical safety: I'm kind of surprised that you more or less came right out and said so.

Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder.

To me, it sounds like "how many trans women per 100k population killed themselves as a result of being persistently 'misgendered'" vs. "how many female people per 100k population were attacked, raped and/or murdered by male strangers" are empirical questions which shouldn't be that difficult to answer. We might well look at the facts on the ground and decide trans women's emotional comfort comes at such a high price that the juice simply isn't worth the squeeze. Or we might not! But systematically elevating the emotional comfort of one demographic over the physical safety of another demographic is not, in my view, compatible with a pluralistic democracy.

First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right.

As long as you and I are both alive, male people will be far more aggressive and prone to murder and sexual assault than female people (along with being more prone to crime in general, although the delta isn't nearly as large when looking just at violent crimes). The murder rate might plummet to a fraction of its current level, but male people will always commit the vast majority of murders. Likewise for assault and rape. As long as this is the case (which it will be forever), male bad actors will always have something to gain by passing themselves off as female if the option is open to them. Thus if your radical self-ID policy is controversial in this time and place, there's good reason to believe that it always will be.

I think I have a much higher probability than you of some sort of singularity in the future. Not necessarily in the near future, not necessarily in the exact form current A.I. gurus talk about - but somewhere between now and the year 3000, yeah, I do think technology will hopefully have improved humans' daily lives very, very radically. I very much anticipate a world where the murder rate plummets to literally zero thanks to automated surveillance, where most people spend their time in V.R. so that the very idea of harping on about what our flesh bodies look like at birth becomes quaint and irrelevant, etc. Quite possibly not in our lifetimes - but eventually. When I consider the moral law, I am asking what principles will make sense to these people of tomorrow, as much as anything. When they look back on our tragic and barbaric times, these people, I want to be remembered as one of those who were clear-headed enough to acknowledge the rights that will be self-evident to them, even when it was costly, even impractical to do so; to be like those rare Ancient Greeks and Romans who spoke out against slavery, even if they had no particular concept of how their empires' economies could have been sustained without it. Again, read Scott's post.

I have read Scott's post several times.

Of course, post-Singularity, all of these petty squabbles about sex, gender, crime, safeguarding etc. will be completely irrelevant.

But, you know, the Singularity hasn't actually happened yet, if you haven't noticed. I find it deeply strange that you're trying to enact policies which would make the world better in a post-Singularity world, while fully cognizant of the fact that they make our pre-Singularity world demonstrably worse, and that the Singularity is unlikely to happen in your lifetime. It's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that they'll win the lottery tomorrow. Actually, it's worse than that - it's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that their great-great-grandson will win the lottery long after they're dead. Even if you knew for a fact that your great-great-grandson would win the lottery long after you're dead, shouldn't you plan your finances a bit more sensibly while you're still alive?

Why do debates with trans activists invariably devolve into nonsensical circular reasoning ("a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", "a woman is a person who experiences misogynistic sexism"), bizarre outré navel-gazing about our transhumanist future, or both? "In the future we'll be able to implant uteri in trans women's bellies and they'll be functionally indistinguishable from female people in every way that counts - therefore we should treat trans women as women now." (paraphrased) And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike! What on earth could this far-off hypothetical scenario possibly have to do with the world in which we currently live, in which nothing resembling a Singularity seems likely to happen and in which no trans woman will ever bear a child in either of our lifetimes?

Okay, first off, I said this stuff wouldn't necessarily happen in our lifetimes. I don't grant that it's outright unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, depending what you mean by 'unlikely'. I think I'm right even if it takes a thousand years, but I do think there's something like a 1/10 that we live to see it. And there's a much better chance that our children live to see it, which makes it very relevant to the kind of values we want to educate them with.

Second, I am against sour-grapes morality. We must acknowledge that good things are good even if practicalities prevent us from getting them just now. We must shout it from the rooftops. We must write it on our monuments in letters ten feet high, so that even if we cannot seize the chance, our children or our children's children will as soon as it is possible for them. If trans rights are currently socially unworkable, but desirable in the long term, both these truths need to be communicated and promoted. The state owes it to trans people to tell them, "we can't give you everything you ought to have just yet. but we know in an ideal world you'd obviously get it. we're sorry, we're so sorry"; not "what you want is incoherent and bad, stop asking for it". Sometimes you can't save everyone, but you have to acknowledge the sacrifices you make, and bear them in your heart forever. To do otherwise is morally outrageous. That is why, regardless of the facts re: practicality, I would view an intellectual alliance with gender-criticals of the breed whose idea of Heaven/Utopia includes no trans people at all as viscerally unacceptable.

Third, sour-grapes morality is a great way to turn your nose up at solutions that already exist, or that could exist in the short term. "In a perfect friction-less Utopia trans rights work" is an extreme assumption that proves a point. I'm not sure the social engineering needs to be quite that extreme, nor that we need this many technological miracles, to get us there. I think there are ways for a society at our current level of technology to allow for a lot more trans rights than conservatives would be willing to grant; and if we don't keep a firm hold of the premise "trans rights are highly desirable if they can be obtained", we won't look for them, we won't find them.

More comments

I'm trying to identify the optimal social norms for generally pro-social law-abiding people to adopt among themselves to ensure their mutual happiness and fulfillment

If you do that these norms can be exploited by people who are not pro-social and law abiding.

Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes.

First of all, as far as you can tell is no metric, it's just your opinion. So if you are arguing for 'here's why I would trust ziz with my children' then go for it, but if you demand society follow suit you need to actually prove that being trans had nothing to do with the cult or murders, which is just ridiculous - in the world where ziz didn't become trans he wouldn't have started a trans cult.

But secondly and way more importantly, who are you to decide what's relevant or not? Why can't progressives just fucking listen to people instead of constantly telling us what opinions we should have? After the past decade of progressive dominance, it sounds like a threat you can't really back up any longer.

Oh and to twist that into 'oh well then we're going to have to label everything and everyone all the time!' is also ridiculous when you don't even have to go back two decades to find out how it would actually be handled - everyone is allowed to behave towards trans people exactly as their conscience dictates - a system which worked fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population.

if you demand society follow suit you need to actually prove that being trans had nothing to do with the cult or murders

No I don't. You're the one making a non-obvious positive claim; the burden of proof is yours. You have to prove relevance, not ask your opponent to prove irrelevance.

Also, I didn't mean 'Ziz's biological sex had no causal influence on her crimes'. I meant 'Ziz's biological sex is not of public interest in and of itself once Ziz's crimes have been established'. If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man. But if he's already holding a bloody knife and trying to hop the border, it's tendentious at best to call everyone's attention to the fact that he's a man as if it's some crucial point of the case.

a system which worked fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population

I am struggling to word a reply to this that doesn't sound like 'right, so you're just a heartless monster, got it'. I guess I could make a desperate appeal to some kind of decency or compassion within you by pointing out that 0.3% of 350 million people is still a staggering amount of people. Or point out that you're discounting the uncountable number of people who would counterfactually have transitioned and led much happier lives if the option had been on the table. Or ask what makes you so sure that the current arrangement ruins more than 0.3% of the population's lives - if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives are an acceptable sacrifice, why not hundreds of thousands of cancelled and witch-hunted right-wing curmudgeons? But frankly I don't hold high hopes of getting through to you.

if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives

Genuine question - in what way(s) are trans people in the United States (and other Anglophone nations) "oppressed"?

I'm not saying they are now, I was bouncing off of @Fruck talking about the days when things were "fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population". I think going back to those days would be prima facie unacceptable. Fruck disagrees.

Can you define oppression then please? Also for clarification, while I don't think it would be unacceptable to go back to the previous situation, I do think it would be impossible - my point was that you don't need to imagine bizarre dystopian situations to handle something we used to handle fine until trans ideology was used as a wedge issue to tear the country apart.

IGI has already said most of the things I would say in response to your core argument, and much more eloquently as usual, although I would add that if your idea of heartless monstrosity is opposing compelled speech, societal gaslighting and the forced restructuring of society to mildly benefit a minority who appear to largely want it for a sexual fetish, if my choices are heartless monster and deceitful snake, then watch out Tokyo, I'm a heartless monster.

In reality, I am not a heartless monster, I was just raised by manipulators so I can easily see through emotional blackmail. And I am well aware you would prefer right wing curmudgeons suffer rather than trans people, I lived through the past decade where progressives enacted policies to ensure just that. I feel like I've already used the word ridiculous too much in this conversation, but it is most appropriate for the idea that you can 'get through' to someone and convince them to make their own life miserable on the off chance it benefits strangers who hate them. Which is precisely why the trans ideologues never bothered to win over the public and immediately employed escalating coercion tactics. And when those tactics were called out, they employed more. And more. And more.

And please don't respond asking 'are you really suffering?' or the equivalent. My being forced to say trans person (instead of the quicker, more natural and poetic tranny) in this den of witches seems about equal to the suffering trans people suffer when someone misgenders them. I can threaten to kill myself if it's still not enough though.

If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man.

What about the odds that they are MTF? Are those higher? Surely they must be just because of the comorbidities.

a heartless monster

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, do they not?

People don't seem to have this sort of reaction when the oppressed minority is victims of vaccine injury. Then we're all heartless monsters.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if you're willing to upend social order and cause immense problems in the name of 0.3% of the population. Because there's vastly, vastly more right-wing curmedgeons than there are trans people. However large the overlap may be.

I've said it here before and I'll say it again: the best social arrangement for marginals is to be politely glossed over and politically inconsequential. Because then maybe people can actually try to solve your problems instead of recruiting you for causes. Queering all of society instead is a fool's errand, a reckless fool at that.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, do they not?

In the sense of justfying acceptable sacrifices when there are people tied to the tracks and the train is arriving. In the long term, however, what you want to do is try to untie people, stop whatever supervillain has been kidnapping them, build fences around train tracks, get train drivers with better eyesight, etc.

When we're talking about real human lives being ruined by the thousand, 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' must never excuse complacency. A status quo in which tens of thousands of people are deeply unhappy with their lot with no hope of betterment is not acceptable in the long term. Until a thousand generations of our brightest, best-intentioned, most open-mined thinkers declare with absolute certainty that there is literally no other way to order a society that would alleviate their suffering, we must not stop searching. Even in the event that other, even more urgent causes must take priority in the active search, we must at least remember what is owed, and keep firmly in mind that the current state of affairs is "the least terrible outrage we could muster", not "fine".

People don't seem to have this sort of reaction when the oppressed minority is victims of vaccine injury.

(For what it's worth, I also think the Left's attitude on this point has been scandalous. How they could claim to support bodily autonomy, and have so little regard for it w. regards to vaccine mandates, is beyond me.)

Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with individual tragedy more than you might think, especially in this case.

But the problem is that, as we have been reminded harshly in these past few years, you can't run your society in the service of marginals to the exclusion of everything else. It just doesn't work. Not even for the marginals themselves.

In fact, it is in the service of searching for betterment that I recommend others and myself to discretion. Not complacency, discretion. Indeed nothing has made it more impossible to study Gender Dysphoria and its still mysterious mechanisms and causes than turning transgenderism into a social movement. And I'm immensely frustrated that I now have to in every instance ask myself, reading any study on the topic, whether or not the author is trying to con me, to the service of whichever side.

It didn't used to be like this. And stupid shit like these language games over pronouns made it so.

We're indeed not at "fine", we're at "some people had their kids taken away from them over this". This sort of behavior is not very popular, and even less so when you're a visible but extremely tiny minority.

I'm not hypothesizing that things were better when we didn't care so much about this issue. I'm telling you. Because I cared then, and I care now, and I can see the difference.

I appreciate you responding, as I do any trans or trans-sympathetic posters here in a very unfriendly space. Now I have to admit the trans issue is one of those that has come close to tilting me away from what used to be my very strong liberal affinity. I really want to be sympathetic to them. I still remain very much "live and let live, and you do you" in my personal ethos. But I think your response is typical in that you see people who object to trans ideologies merely reacting out of disgust, or dislike that trans people are engaging in delusion. That's a lot of it, I'm sure. But:

And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime.

Okay, fine, fair enough. If a trans woman is actually getting off hanging out with women in a locker room and imagining herself one of them, or fantasizing about being a pretty pretty girl being railed by a totally straight dude who either doesn't know or doesn't care that she's trans, yes, I agree, it's "whatever" as far as what is going on in her own mind.

The problem is that when we talk about "bad actors," we're not just talking about trans people having dirty thoughts they keep to themselves. We're talking about, for example in the Gabrielle Darone case, a trans woman who got women who had miscarriages kicked out of a support group because they won't go along with her fantasy of having miscarried. We're talking about trans women who walk around in women's locker rooms sporting a very obvious erection. It too often is being indecent in public, and then bullying any women who object.

If they stuck to jerking off at home, neither I nor anyone else would know or care. If they posted on Twitter about how much they like jerking off while fantasizing about being a woman, maybe some people would be disgusted but no one has to read their posts. But it's the public behavior which tipped me over the edge. And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."

And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."

I understand your frustration. If it were up to me, there would certainly be a lot less sweeping-under-the-carpet of genuine bad behavior from trans folks. But still: let he whose in-group has not closed ranks around a problematic tribe-mate, rather than let the lynch mob have him, cast the first stone. It's a natural tribal instinct, particularly when you think your community is facing an existential risk.

Maybe your beef is only with trans women who happen to genuinely be sexual predators; but if trans activists have reason to believe that there is a genuine political will in America to tar them all with that exact brush to - to classify all trans people as perverts and sex offenders by definition - are you going to publicize their existence? Are you going to give conservative media the satisfaction, are you going to give them the ammo to oppress you?

(If you're a prominent Jew in early-20th-century Germany and you find conclusive evidence that this Jewish banker you know has been defrauding some goyim clients, you would be insane to publicly accuse him and call the state police. Even if you're pretty sure the law enforcement personnel who'd handle that specific case aren't particularly anti-Semitic. Now, personally I think "trans genocide" is an ill-chosen phrase, but its merits don't matter here: this is the world trans activists think they live in, so of course they act accordingly.)

The theory that transgenderism as a movement is secretly very permissive of sexual assault on cis women doesn't survive contact with reality. The purity spirals of highly trans spaces from Tumblr to leftist Discord servers are infamous for good reason. Making excuses for trans predators is nothing more or less than a PR move - call it desperate or call it craven - it's nothing more than bog-standard respectability politics.

  • -10

If you're a prominent Jew in early-20th-century Germany and you find conclusive evidence that this Jewish banker you know has been defrauding some goyim clients, you would be insane to publicly accuse him and call the state police.

If I was a prominent Jew in early 20th century Germany and had a gun, I would be justified in finding the local Nazis and killing them in cold blood.

If the situation is bad enough that you are justified in shooting people dead, you're also justified in doing a lot of lesser things that you normally wouldn't be justified in doing. And if you're deluded into thinking the world is that bad, you're a menace to society; this isn't some minor disagreement.

The theory that transgenderism as a movement is secretly very permissive of sexual assault on cis women doesn't survive contact with reality.

"Permissive" doesn't have to mean "deliberately intends to". It often means "has standards which rule out being able to handle". You don't have to be intentionally trying to bring about X for your actions to enable X.

While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive. Would I feel differently if I were a Jew in Nazi Germany? Probably, but I cannot emphasize how much I think "trans genocide" is absolute bullshit. This is like the feminists who think we are literally on the verge of The Handmaid's Tale. If you justify closing ranks around predators because your enemies are Literally Hitler then you pretty much lose any appeal to rational acceptance and tolerance.

While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive.

I don't disagree. I'm just saying: everyone does it, from queers to Pentacostals. It tells you very little about the moral integrity of the average member of the group, and ~0 about the merits of their ideology. So you shouldn't let this stuff affect how you think of trans rights qua trans rights, unless you're prepared to throw overboard any position whose proponents commit this kind of epistemological sin.

(And let's be fair. Literal concentration camps for trans people might be science fiction, but a plurality of conservatives would proudly own up to wanting to make crossdressing/being-publicly-transgender illegal, and a majority would at least want it to be socially shunned. Calling that "genocide" might be hyperbolic but trans activists can't be faulted for worrying about it a fair bit.)

  • -10

Which propositions do you think have majority/plurality support among conservatives in the united states, or even if you limit it to red state conservatives?

  1. Requiring trans people to use restrooms, locker rooms, etc of their birth sex.
  2. Banning men from wearing dresses/skirts in public, with exceptions specified by law for eg bagpipers.
  3. Requirement for civil servants to present as their birth sex, enforced through eg public school teacher dress codes.
  4. Automatic classification of drag shows as sexually-oriented, subjecting them to the same restrictions on attendance, advertising, etc as strip clubs.
  5. Ban on drag shows.
  6. Requirement for individuals to present in accordance with their birth sex in places where children are known to congregate.
  7. Requirement for individuals to present in accordance with their birth sex when in view of the public.
  8. Requirement for institutions dealing with minors to mandate they present in accordance with their birth sex.
  9. Ban on gender reassignment medical procedures, including cross sex hormones, for adults as well as children.
  10. Ban on gender reassignment medical procedures, including cross sex hormones and puberty blockers, for children.
  11. Known transgenders automatically registered as sex offenders.
  12. Requirements for all large institutions to mandate everyone dealing with them present in accordance with their birth sex.

I think you'd have majority support for 1, 3, 4, and 10, and plurality support for 8. I don't think anything else on that list rises to that level.

Interesting that you phrase all of these as requirements/restrictions/what-have-you as opposed to permissions/freedoms/what-have-you. Interesting that you have 9 for children & adults, and 10 for children, but no 'for adults'.

I suspect you'd get different responses between the following categories:

  1. Freedom to do X, with no stance on later potential additional permissions/freedoms/what-have-you down the line.
  2. Freedom to do X, and a flat no to additional permissions/freedoms/what-have-you down the line.
  3. Ban on more than X, with no stance on later potential additional requirements/restrictions/what-have-you down the line.
  4. Ban on more than X, and a flat no to later potential additional requirements/restrictions/what-have-you down the line.

I agree, though with the caveat that this only describes today's conservatives. Salami tactics aren't the sole purview of the Left; in a world where 1, 3, 4 and 10 become hitching points of the Overton window, hardliners will find it easier to drum up support for the rest of the list. For example, if you had 3, 4 and 8, 12 might not be codified into law overnight but would run a high risk of quickly becoming the unspoken norm, in exactly the same way that DEI-style measures became endemic even in institutions with no hard legal mandate to apply them.

I also think you phrased 4 as a needlessly weak version of that particular fear. With things like the withheld Disney cartoon, it goes beyond drag shows qua drag shows: the concern is that conservatives want to legally equate "being publicly trans" with "drag", and qualify any media depicting transition as adult-only media, not just live drag shows. I couldn't care less whether minors can go to drag shows, but I would consider it very damaging and illiberal to restrict their access to non-sexual books, comics and cartoons with trans characters in them. And I'm pretty sure you could get majority support for that among today's conservatives, albeit perhaps by not that wide of a margin.

I am, actually. The Roman Catholic Church justifiably took a huge hit because they chose to protect a tiny handful of bad actors rather than let them be properly exposed and punished. And to be fair, the Church never claimed that what their child molesting priests did was okay, or that it didn't happen. Which is different from trans activists, who generally take the position that no trans woman is ever a bad actor, and if there are any, they are singular exceptions and only bigots would notice them.

I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.

(I almost wrote: "or of Catholicism as a belief system", which isn't true, but only because Catholicism is inherently self-referential, affirming the holiness and infallibility of the Church as an article of faith. The basic points of gender ideology in no way imply, let alone rely on the assumption, that today's trans activists and community leaders are heavenly-appointed and infallible.)

I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople [...]

Would you say the same about all organizations? Or is this specific to a subset thereof? If so, what is the criteria for an organization to be in said subset?

I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.

Sure, and generally speaking I do not think less of individual Catholics even though I think their religion and their Church is hokum. I also do not think less of individual trans people - the ones I know are generally pretty nice and chill. That said, I can tell the Catholics I know (if it comes up) that I don't share their beliefs or support their Church, and they might argue with me but they generally won't take offense as long as I'm not being an asshole about it. I cannot tell the trans people I know that I am only being polite and I don't really think they are women (or "non-binary"). They might suspect that's how I feel (they probably know that's how many people feel) but if I were to let the mask slip, even unintentionally and without malice, there would be social consequences. I resent this, and I do think it comes pretty close to being unquestionable holy doctrine in the minds of many activists.

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