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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.
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.
What? Are you seriously arguing that only the strongest men are more muscular than women, on average?
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.
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.
"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?
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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
One thing I think you're glossing over here is the possibility that some of the things some trans people want really are incoherent and bad.
In the transhumanist future in which anyone who wants to undergo a body transplant and transfer their brain into a body of their desired sex, I'm confident some significant number of trans people would take the deal. But I'm equally confident that some significant number of trans people wouldn't take the deal, would keep their bodies more or less as-is, and would demand to be "treated like a woman" anyway.
My evidence for this prediction is the current state of the evidence in our world. For such a seemingly straightforward concept ("a trans woman is a man who wants to be a woman"), it's surprisingly difficult to pin down a workable definition. One of our resident trans posters proposed "a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina". But in response, I noted that such a definition excludes almost everyone who calls themselves a trans woman:
I'm sure it will not surprise you that the resident trans poster in question refused to bite the bullet, and stated that she would still consider a trans woman a woman even if she knew for a fact that the person in question had a penis which they had no intention of giving up.
Now, granted, the current state of the art in bottom surgery produces a very crude facsimile of a real vagina which has to be dilated indefinitely, isn't self-lubricating and is useless from the point of becoming pregnant (and all related auxiliary functions). I'm sure there are some trans women right now who would really like a vagina instead of a penis, but are holding out until the state of the art improves significantly. Or perhaps they can't afford it or it isn't covered under their insurance etc. This is all perfectly understandable. (Even if you're only on a waiting list to undergo bottom surgery, I'm going to take your claim to identifying as a woman a lot more seriously than if you aren't.) In the transhumanist future in which undergoing a cross-sex body transplant was as quick, cheap and painless as getting a vaccination, I'm sure significantly more than 9% of trans women would avail of it. Especially if it was reversible.
But I'm also confident that if I surveyed the ~90% of trans women who haven't undergone bottom surgery about what they would do in the hypothetical future where body transplants are cheap and painless, a significant proportion of them would say "I wouldn't avail of it. I like having a penis." A "girldick" is the preferred term, I understand.
Like, at what point am I allowed to say "what you want is incoherent and bad"? Demanding to be treated like a woman despite possessing a penis and wanting to hang on to it seems incoherent and bad. Demanding to be allowed to participate in female sporting events without having made even most the token effort to reduce your T levels seems bad and unfair. Demanding that lesbians let you put your dick in them and calling them bigots if they don't want to seems bad. I feel zero qualms about saying my idea of utopia includes zero creepy male people who use trendy identity politics to emotionally manipulate women into fucking them, or to secure an unfair competitive advantage in sporting events.*
Likewise, in our hypothetical future in which undergoing a body transplant was quick and painless, certain male people refused to undergo one, but demanded that they receive all the social and legal privileges** associated with being a woman anyway - I feel like I'd be well within my rights to say "you're a bad actor and a malingerer, knock it off". A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because of the current state of medical technology - that's an engineering problem. A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because they lack the financial resoures to make it happen - that's a scarcity problem. A male person who wants to keep his male body but wants to be "treated like a woman" anyway - that's just someone taking the piss, and we both know it.
If your idea of utopia includes some amount of these people, then I have to ask - why? Is there any point at which you say "what this person is demanding is incoherent, bad and unreasonable"? Or is every demand a trans person makes de facto a reasonable demand to make, by virtue of their being trans?
*Two particular kinds of bad behaviour which, needless to say, are not peculiar to trans women.
**Assuming that any such privileges still exist in the world in which female sex is literally an elective category.
I think the problem is that we have very different ideas of the ideal transhumanist future. Any transhumanist future worth its salt is by definition going to be, well, transhumanist: to involve people transforming themselves beyond the standard human forms and lifestyles. Never mind fretting about people who want to inhabit bodies that have mismatched but naturally-occurring sexual characteristics: I expect that quite a lot of people, in the long run, will find that they prefer to interact with the (virtual?) world as glowing obelisks, anthropomorphic cats, anime girls complete with Roger Rabbit black outlines, and, doubtless, all manner of much stranger things we couldn't even predict from our pre-singularity vantage point. It is these hypothetical posthumans who I imagine cringing at the thought that "she" is inherently wrong/a lie if applied to a person whose body has a penis, when it will routinely be applied to people who have no genitalia or chromosomes at all.
(And, indeed, people who may never have had any because they only ever existed as digital consciousnesses. Thus far I've talked about VR, brain uploads, and so on - but what about A.I.? If we crack sentient A.I.s, what will that do to our understanding of gender, do you think? Do you think it's radically wrong for people in the Star Trek universe to call Data a "he"?)
I also see the sleight of hand you're attempting here. "In the future there'll be sentient individuals who have no genitalia or chromosomes who everyone considers it unremarkable to call 'she'; therefore there should be nothing objectionable about calling penised individuals 'she' in our world (in which every sentient individual has chromosomes and only a negligibly small portion don't have genitalia)".
I will reiterate that my grandmother has no wheels.
I'm arguing that the trans-inclusive policies you're endorsing have a demonstrably negative impact on women and children's safeguarding. You're dismissing this criticism by saying none of it will matter in the post-Singularity transhumanist future. Fair enough - but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter now.
Frankly, this line of reasoning proves too much. I presume, as a self-identified progressive, you are a staunch opponent of racism and think that colour-blind policies which don't take historical oppression into account make the lives of people of colour worse. Why couldn't I retort "pfft - after the Singularity, the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their skin tone will be as alien to humans as the idea of discriminating against someone on the basis of their preferred flavour of ice cream"? Even if this is true, so what? What would it have to do with your criticism? Fucking nothing, is what.
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I have a hard time accepting your apparent claim that wanting to live your life as an embodied anime girl and not being able to constitutes some kind of unspeakable tragedy, on a par with (or in the same ballpark as) the reality of sickness, aging and mortality. I don't believe that "being able to live your life as an embodied anime girl" is a project that any public monies should be invested into achieving. If, a result of the overreaches and poor message discipline of the trans activist movement, there is less of an appetite for investing public monies into making this desire a reality, that strikes me as an unequivocal good.
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Nothing much. However AIs copy themselves or iterate upon themselves, it will bear little relationship to sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism as we currently understand it.
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In my idea of Heaven/Utopia, the problem of people's inner gender identity being mismatched with their body is solved, one way or another, whether through widely available and accepted psychosurgery or resleevable bodies. If there are conclaves of people who wish for some reason to continue to inflict the trans culture of the early 21st century onto themselves, like there are communities of "capital D Deaf" people now, in my idea of Heaven/Utopia I do not have to interact with them or accomodate them.
Many leftists and leftist-adjacents online seem to mistake the crutch for a permanent solution in this way. No there's no "UBI" or "healthcare" in a perfect world - in a perfect world you just own the commons and don't get sick.
See my post here — in my idea of a post-Singularity Utopia, a large number, perhaps even a majority of living people would no longer be using what we'd recognize as human bodies at all. They would consider "she/her is appropriate for a trans woman" obvious not as its own free-floating principle specific to 21st century trans people made of flesh and blood, but because they would recognize that using "she/her" might be trivially correct for a digital consciousness which presents itself as female, whether it's the upload of a once-biologically-male brain, the upload of a once-biologically-female brain, or indeed an A.I. that never had a biological sex.
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If you do that these norms can be exploited by people who are not pro-social and law abiding.
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