This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
I'm thinking of some of those long time WWE stars who have been so deep in kayfabe that they end up kind of seeming like their characters
More options
Context Copy link
I think the concept of parasocial (self) relationships applies here. People, disproportionately those with an underdeveloped sense of self, can develop "relationships" with characters or other mediated personalities. Almost be definition, this is a very imbalanced relationship as the viewer / audience has strong feelings of attachment, connection, and attraction to the character. This can range from a relatively benign situation ("Beyonce and I would be best friends) to crippling dependency (camgirl addicts who over-invest into the parasocial camgirl relationship to the level of personal financial ruin).
In terms of your alternate definition of "gender identity" I think there's a case to be made that trans/non-binary folks have created a parasocial relationship with an idealized version of themselves. Falling in love with who they think they want to be. To me there's some circumstantial evidence to support this; the disproportionately higher rate of schizophrenia and other psychotic features in the trans population etc. When the sense of self is severely warped or underdeveloped, bad, bad things happen. Remember, simple isolation and prolonged solitary confinement is recognized as torture. To remain healthy and mentally stable, humans need reinforcement loops with other humans. If you've substituted your own self-perpetuating and idealized feedback loop within your own head ... wearing funny clothes is the least of your concerns.
This is going to sound mean but one of the reasons I've largely stopped participating in conversations about sex, gender, relationships, etc... is that so many of the surrounding it is so, for lack of a better term, "autistic". Someone who doesn't seem to unterstand the concept of food preferences will turn around and argue the primacy of self-identification over empirical observation. Or alternately the inverse where you get idiots arguing that a trait is either 100% masculine or 100% feminine and then they tie themselves in knots arguing that men who display qualities that are traditionally coded as feminine are secret [redacted]/[redacted] and women who assert themselves are secretly men and It's all so fucking tiring to argue against.
That said, I think you're on to something in that I think a lot of it really does down to an underdeveloped sense of self. People who have a reasonably healthy sense of self and who are comfortable in their own skin don't need to make their weird sex thing their whole identity.
Some of this propably is a lack of social understanding from the people involved, but I think a good bit also comes from arguing in a formalistic way. Where, instead of "being reasonable", and using your common sense to grease the understanding, they try to be very literal about everything. Theyre doing this on purpose, not because they dont have common sense, but because, to stick with the metaphor, greasing well might let you get work done even with a mistake in the gears that you dont notice.
Potentially finding that mistake is prioritised because you dont particularly care about getting to the "practical" outcome. Theres propably many cases of red- and blue-pillers arguing with each other who handle their real-life relationship very similarly. The goal is to understand "what things really are", in some sense. To nerdy liberals, whether men or women are "really" treated unfairly in relationships is such an abstract question, not necessarily related to practical recommendations for anyone, but very important morally. And I think its clear why such a "reality" could be interesting on the trans topic.
This isnt intended to convince you such arguments are a good use of time, they propably mostly arent, but you might appreciate knowing it.
Those are all really good points actually. I appreciate you putting it out there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Plus one. And it is frustrating because it is so often divorced from reality and build upon the (non)premise of "No, this is how I feel. You can't argue with how I feel."
The counter-intuitive thing, in my mind, is that a well developed sense of self is often easier developed within a group or community. Major upfront caveat - not in a group/community that is completely dedicated to developing personal senses of self. Let me explain. Say you're part of a gym group - crossfit, traditional powerlifting, MMA, cycling, rock climbing, whatever. That group is there for the activity; developing the skills, trading advice, swapping stories. The purpose is beyond that of the group members themselves. This same principle applies to non-physical organizations as well. I'm in a professional society - let's say I'm a professional cake baker so that I don't doxx myself. I go to meetings and conferences, I know some folks. I've learned better cakery along the way. The important part in terms of sense of self is that I have these stable groups wherein I can place myself. I'm a batter cakerist than John from Cincinnati, but not quite as skilled as Mary from Hershey, Pennsylvania. I can lift more than Steve, but less than Don. We all get a long. I have confidence in what I can do, and a healthy humility regarding what I can't, and the group itself doesn't castigate me for my relative skill level.
Contrast that, first, to groups who are only about the preservation and boosting of the ego. These are largely online communities that sometimes get together in meatspace. What's the reward system there? Either a) be the loudest person in the group in terms of over-the-top unconditional support for the others (these would be your "yass queen, slay" types) or b) be the loudest person in the group in terms of victimhood identification. There's no other place to be within those groups because there would be no point. Again the whole point of those kind of groups is to boost individuals within them, there's no external goal/purpose/motivation. That leads to very quick sprints to the extreme.
But rewind the tape a little. What if I'm not in any of the above? I'm just a very online person who strongly identifies as something or another. Well, then we get into what I consider to be pretty dangerous territory. Absent of any meaningful community or group affiliation, people overcompensate be either super-inflating their own egos to fill up that void, or letting that crushing loneliness compress them into a neutron star that explodes. The outcomes vary. On the one hand, you have Gen-Z tiktokers giving rageful speeches about weird new pronouns. On the other, you have displaced loners killing themselves and, sadly, often other people. My theory is that it largely comes from the same primary source - lack of a sense of self and the resulting hyper-compensation. The cure isn't pop-psychology mindfulness, ill-defined "self-care", or, of course, hormonal modification. It's developing bonds within a structure larger than yourself to develop a stable self.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Comedians who adopt a long term on stage persona are know to end up becoming the character. Andrew Dice Clay started as one (the Diceman) of several characters Andrew Clay Silverstein played on stage in his act.
Dice was the breakout character and Silverstein had to act like him all of the time.
I was thinking about this a lot around when Gilbert Gottfried died. You sometimes hear comedians who knew him well light heartedly gloat in interviews about how they heard his normal speaking voice. And some young comedian who never knew him personally would predictably go "You mean he didn't talk like that normally?!"
But think about the world of showbusiness Gilbert Gottfried operated in. He put in his time doing standup, then moved onto acting and commercials. And it was easy to keep that mask on in public appearances, because there weren't many, and they were controlled environments. Press junkets, late night interviews, and his performances. He may have been "in character" 5% of his life or less?
With the modern entertainment landscape, of daily Youtube uploads, daily 8 to 12 hour long twitch streams, constant social media interactions, etc, I don't think it's crazy to assume people might be "in character" more than 50% of their time. And at that point, how much separation is there between the character you've crafted for the internet and you anymore? I mean theoretically there is some nugget of "you" rattling around in there. But I believe stronger that you are what you do, and that character is more the "real" you that whatever pre-character idealized self you've put up on the shelf, hoping to return to at some unknown time and place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A variant is Becoming The Mask. Or more generally, the advice to "fake it 'til you make it."
Consider habits, and consciously choosing to develop one. It takes work to wear the rut into your unconscious, but the habit takes less effort to maintain over time, and may eventually integrate itself into your normal course of behavior. I'd say that rehearsing a role is just one example of this type of personality modification, that is intended to be broader in scope but only temporary for the purposes of the production.
More options
Context Copy link
[cw: probably an invasive meme, although not a particularly harmful one. Also, caveat: I don't think Bailey or Blanchard's model is particularly useful as an approach for the typical trans woman, even and in part because there are actual 'cis'-by-conventional-standards autogynophiles.]
There's a variety and range on these matters: actors taking method acting to extremes either falsely (no one cares about Leto) to more serious issues (Bowie didn't seem to handle his stage persona well at all), and multiples (don't ask) can range from wanting integration to actively being appalled by the concept. It's enough of an issue that there's a lot of psychological screening that goes on for serious undercover investigation roles. TvTropes (cw: tvtropes) has a pretty good list of some real-life examples at the bottom of this page, mostly focused on actors.
((Though not everyone seems vulnerable: Norah Vincent's later suicide is probably unrelated to her time living as a man, but even when she liked the social aspects she never really seemed to change self-identity.))
Fictional tulpa or tulpa-likes that take over their creator is a popular target of media, but actual people who've made one and complain about it tend to be more frustrated just that they can't get it to shut up (and arguably some impact on performance in some testing scenarios?) rather than it becoming the new 'real' personality.
((Furries and some non-furries that spend too much time in VR have reported weird results. Some therianthropes claimed to get similar fake-tactile feedback with sufficient meditation in a pre-VR environment, but it's... hard to find good documentation now. And impacts on personality from an avatar are pretty well-documented well outside of VR, although insert necessary caveats about social science research, even if I've been more impressed by Nick Yee than most social scientists.))
Outside of the more out-there therians and actors, though, this can be hard to notice from the outside, and harder still to distinguish from normal personality changes from simply being in these environments. It's weird if you wanted to have your last name legally changed to match your wrestling stage name or fursona, but unless you also get in a shootout with cops or pick a name the courts don't like, it's probably not going to make the news.
And if it's not changing your name or gender (or phenotype), it might even be part of the intent going in! There's a lot of people who go into VR with the intent of getting more used to meatspace interactions, and it's hard to tell the difference between being more social because you've gotten the practice, and being more social because that's what your avatar would do. If gatt the nardodragon likes pranks more than I do, or gry the Hrothgar is just generally cheerful, it might even be hard for me internally to notice if I’m more them one day. Even if I present mannerisms that are solely artifacts of those game's designers or animators, there’s mirror neuron reasons it could happen just as a matter of course rather than some deep identity matters.
So ?
Just because 2/3rds of people who jerk off to autogynephilic pornography don't have any dysphoria or desire to transition and aren't deluded enough to believe they can change sex, or that's remotely a good idea doesn't mean 1/3rd can't be afflicted in such a way.
Maybe they've peculiar personalities. Maybe their personality is fluid enough due to I dunno, borderline PD that they can mess it up through mere fantasy somehow.
Far bigger proportion of people who enjoy such pornography report being gender dysphoric than the general population. There's likely a connection.
There's some potentially interesting discussion on any link, though untangling correlation and causation, and the direction of causation, gets a little awkward. I don't think that question is useful, but that's largely a separate question. I think cis autogynophiles can be very weird (at least by socon or normie understandings of the term), even compared to actual trans women. The problem for Blanchard's typology is that they're weird in different ways than Blanchard or Bailey predicted or described retroactively, in ways that make the whole typology a wrong model.
Blanchard specifically made this typology under the claim that it covered the whole of the field, in a clear division, between autogynophilic 'straight' or 'bisexual's who transition in contexts separate from searches for relationships (and sometimes at cost to existing relationships), and 'gay' ones that transition in part to attract straight men (... sometimes in the context of prostitution) and, importantly, are not autogynophilic:
These are pretty core to the observations: Blanchard's first papers were about collapsing broader categories from previous approaches like Hirch's, to the point where he concluded that any self-reported androphilia among less originally-femmy trans women was largely an artifact of those trans women really being interested in women but having to jump through hoops for hormones/therapy. Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen has a short 'quiz' to identify a specific transperson, and 8 of the 12 questions are about directly about the subject's sexual orientation, with a further two asking if they worked in a classically masculine or feminine career.
Yet you can find a tremendous number of cis and trans fans of a lot of 'sissy' porn verging on 'transification' that you focus on, which is about as sexually oriented toward the thought or images of themselves as women could be, and are also primarily interested themselves-as-women getting railed by men, which do not show the facelessness that Bailey once focused so heavily on. To the point where F/F visuals are actually pretty uncommon. Conversely, Bailey's 'quiz' would identify quite a lot of simple gay crossdressers as 'straight' autogynophiles; to the extent some would not be identified as 'homosexual transvestites' by Blanchard's approach despite being exactly that reflected less their disinterest in or having a vagina, which some small number of gay men can develop as a kink, but because there's not that much demand for hair stylists or prostitutes.
This was, to be fair, perhaps a somewhat reasonable mistake to have made in the early-90s, when there weren't many visible trans people (and the standards for social science were even worse than today's). There are certainly some people that fit into these specific combinations, and there's a variety of reasons that they'd be oversampled in Blanchard's original survey groups. But there's just as many where this entire framework makes no sense. Even in Bailey's era, he encountered the outskirts of this matter (eg, a section in TMWWBQ talks about what Bailey called "men who want to have sex with 'she-males'", and what trans women today call 'chasers', which Bailey tried to squeeze into a format of autogynophilia that seems really hard to match with their overwhelming desire to suck a woman's dick). Blanchard's research crowed about Blanchard-identified autogynophiles who, when asked a hypothetical about getting either complex physical or social transition, exclusively, and half taking the physical transition, and then mumblemumbled' something about the other half.
And nowadays you have a broad portion of gay men fantasizing about an appealing vagina-equipped body, sometimes up to and including getting knocked up (and, uh, other more esoteric and unlikely fantasies)... except they don't want a straight male partner, or to have breasts, (or even necessarily to preferentially bottom), while the 'homosexual transsexual' category for the typology predicts that they'd have been driven by interest in attracting a straight male top. Or those "men who want to have sex with 'she-males'" who were sublimating their true autogynophilia, increasingly don't want to go any further than cross-dress even in fantasy where sprouting a perfect pair(s) of breasts are a simple click away (and otherwise violate the 'quiz' from TMWWBQ). Or femmy-and-early-transitioning gynophiles, or masculine-and-late-transitioning androphiles, or situations like non-op trans-on-trans relationships, or the various androphiles that have crossdressing kinks focused around how lifting up a skirt with a boner is hot, so on and so forth. Even presuming for the sake of this argument that every trans person fits into one of these categories, the categories themselves don't actually describe reality near the level of consistency and clarity that Blanchard or Bailey uses; they're not even especially helpful as fuzzy predictions rather than far-edge stereotypes.
Worse, this undermines its predictive power, not just its categorical approach. TMWWBQ isn't about how people were driven to transness by these interests, but about how these interests were served by transition, which the Blanchard typology believes to be not just the driving force but the central tool for even self-evaluation of progress and quality of life. But this becomes incoherent when the boundaries between categories fall not just to rare outliers, but fairly common cases and interests. The autogynophile interest in putting on a dress and jacking it as core to the entire category's interaction with the fairer sex might well have been true for a handful of people seeing a gender therapy clinic, but more than its faults as a test, its broad failure to handle non-erotic crossplay among 'heterosexuals' is pretty clear. Conversely, TMWWBQ believes that autogynophiles went to transexuality because they had no recourse for their fantasies otherwise, sounds like a joke to anyone who's been on a roleplay forum, MMOs, or the VR communities that have collected a lot of trans women, or even with your predictions that these matters feedback onto themselves. Bailey's description of 'homosexual' transsexuals gets less pushback from mainstream trans activists (and even the nutty Andrea James-style trans activists), but it's just as prone to these faults: Bailey combines demure and effortless femininity from a young age with limited and unsatisfying romantic and sexual relationships in his description of how "fundamentally, all homosexual transsexuals are similar", which might have been a reasonable mistake to draw from a handful of and is so hilariously wrong if you actually go amongst broader communities that it's hard not to laugh.
Well articulated! It's annoying to see trans-skeptics latch onto AGP as a non-mainstream explanation of trans when it doesn't fit most modern trans people. Blanchard's ideas also poorly explains the negative parts of dysphoria - the extreme distress at being perceived or seeming male (although I don't think 'male born in woman's body' by itself explains those either).
More options
Context Copy link
As long as someone's weirdness is contained within highly sanity hazardous 'art' or roleplay which is kept out of the public eye, nobody cares. And I don't think that's actually true - e.g. the stereotype of AGPs who transitioned isn't that they were particularly weird, but that they are conceited jerks, which is probably related to having been able to convince themselves that they should do it.
There's also a reason why people are afraid and avoid trans 'women'. People who are as quick to take offense as any 16th century aristocrat and are one mental health crisis away from a breakdown are somewhat ..more problematic.
I'd not make that claim at all. Why do you say so?
We are going to find out in a few years when it's going to be possible to get something smart to laboriously check the entire content of e.g. fictionmania, or archiveofourown or other porn sites that have a lot of that shit, and tell us what kind of characters there, what's the action, themes. We'll know then.
I agree that it's completely fucked up and quite confusing, as I note from observing some hobbyist researchers trying to make sense out of it all.
However, one thing is certain - broadly speaking, the people involved, judging by their 'artistic' output are nothing like 'a mind trapped in a body of the opposite sex'. Perhaps a few (~10%), but generally absolutely not.
Internet has vastly complicated the picture by letting people have access to complicated sexual fantasies. Simple ones don't do it anymore. These days even housewives have heard about the weird pests strangely interested in menstruation products, etc.
.. and why is the research of low quality ?
Perhaps it is because anyone sane avoids the field and rather does something else. Only a masochist would who look at what has happened to people who didn't appease the nutty activists like Andrea James and decided "I'm going to do solid research on this weird phenomenon and risk getting very online single-minded obsessives angry at me".
Modulo trolls, to an extent, but my point's less about whether people care and how well the model describes reality. I don't think Blanchardian theory needs to explain a guy who fetishizes getting knocked up in the vagina or having their skull literally fucked, for one example (eg Kyrosh for an artist who draws well and isn't gory). But once you explain why he doesn't think himself as -- and isn't even comfortable in -- trans spaces with the phrase "aren't deluded enough", it either needs a big asterisk or it needs an explanation.
Yeah, that's fair. If the claim behind Blanchard's typology was to separate transwomen into Drama Queens and people who picked names starting with "A"... well, it wouldn't be completely without controversy, since drama queens and you'd need an inclusive and, but it'd mirror a lot of complaints inside the community.
Largely because Blanchard's typology is categorical and admits few exceptions, to the point where Bailey takes reporting errors as evidence that all exceptions are reporting error. In this environment, existence proof is enough, and I've got more than a couple cases there. It's hard to think of something more autogynophilic, in either the trans or not-trans sense, as something like XChange... but that it's present at all is something Blanchard and especially Bailey specifically reject as part of the typology.
I'm willing to accept a predilection toward it, and probably a pretty strong one, though even there I think it wouldn't be as strong as Blanchard's original dataset would point, if only for selection reasons. If you want to get into it, I'd further expect trans-focused porn is more sub-focused and more likely to have surgical or blood-oriented aspects than average. But that's retreating pretty far from Blanchard's typology.
It's that totalizing aspect that makes Blanchard's typology such an awkward fit, and it's not just a problem on the autogynophilia side. I'd compare Strype with Accelo for an example of people who'd be very easy to make a predictive analysis from the "discomfort with own body" sense, and give very wrong guesses in more than one direction even assuming Strype is autogynophilic (for the sake of your eyeballs, I'll avoid linking to then-his-now-her excellent gay smut). Accelo's emphasize on a femmy version of themselves getting railed by named and developed characters of both genders but favoring men is not unusual either among cis gay men or clearly and conventionally androphillic trans women.
The archetypes Blanchard's talking about exist, and may well have actually been extremely uncommon in Blanchard's original datasets, given the nature of selection there -- I'm not calling his work any more fraudy than other social science of the time -- but even in his original datasets he was throwing out 10%+ as lizardman constant. There were justifiable reasons to do so at the time, but in the modern era you can get a much deeper and far more direct glimpse at unvarnished fringes of human sexuality and it just doesn't seem to fit nearly as well.
I'm not particularly sold on that model, either, and I'm not even sure it's considered likely or even acceptable to voice inside a lot of the modern trans movement; if you want some deeper evidence against I can give it. But I think you need to do a lot more to prove one theory than to disprove another.
Yeah, that's fair, and I've spoken up against that aspect in the past in trans-friendly environments. The bizarre emphasis on disagreement-as-suicide-baiting doesn't do the movement favors, and the immediate jump to threats does even less.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How is the ratio in comparison to an equally niche subgroup? Gen pop is not the right comparison here, I don't think.
Also, links please.
In general population, ratio of transgender used to be 1 in 5000 or 1 in 10k before 2010.
The data I remember was was something like half dysphorics, some survey by tailcalled. (more in the later part of this reply)
Even now outside of certain US high schools girl circles where it gets into % range, gender dysphoria is still vanishingly rare.
There are similar conditions, e.g. some other cases where people come to identify with the object of their erotic desires -e.g. amputee fetishists are far more likely to have to want their limbs hacked off, fat fetishists are much more likely to desire being fat than random people.. but I don't know actual ratios in these groups. Probably nobody does.
As to popularity of autogynephilic pornography:
if we consider the amount of content existing on a general pornographic board such as f95zone.to..
on that rather extensive site devoted to content creation and pirating content, there are cca 180 threads classed as 'sissification' (maybe half or more of AGP porn is like that).
Hard to tell how popular AGP stuff is compared to say common favorites such as harem, oral sex etc as searching by tags tops out at 1k results.
Meanwhile, the site has ~5000 threads marked as 'renpy' which is a common 'visual novel' development framework.
So, in the single digit % range at best, probably less popular.
Or, alternatively, you can check another huge general porn archive : https://archiveofourown.org/ and check what's the ratio of tags there. It won't be high.
As to the data it was by tailcalled, and you can probably find something on this website by /u/tailcalled who used to post on /slatestarcodex and motte a bit hangs out there. The site is down atm, it was still up last month. He hangs out at this discord: https://discord.gg/ptqeCQg, where I failed to find links to it.
He posted one time a somewhat large-ish survey with a result that showed that basically, there's not much correlation between strength of autogynephilic desires and gender dysphoria, with many men with strong autogynephilic desires reporting no gender dysphoria. However, in it, something like half of all men with gender dysphoria reported some autogynephilia. So, there's definitely some association, and searches through the discord showed there's debate going on whether it's GD -> AGP or AGP -> GD or some other factor causing both. Complicated business.
Sorry, I've just spent cca 40 minutes tracking it down and can't find it atm. It was definitely from a survey of his. Maybe I'll find something later.
EDIT:
Just checked up on what tailcalled has been up to on reddit and there was this subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/sissyology/
With 90k subscribers. (insert the rolling on the floor laughing emoji). It's one of those 'simulation is glitching' things.
Thank you!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is there even a difference? A new behaviour is established, gets positive reinforcement, grows.
Yes, few people have the ability to keep their inner life unchanged when they get a lot of reinforcement in a different direction. And describing it like that, I think its easy to see how having that ability would put you at risk for a different kind of insanity.
Google is useless here, mind elaborating?
At the boring level, people do seem to behave differently based on their avatar, specifically, even when not self-selected. Again, caveat social science research (it's a little hilarious in retrospect how much effort went to eliminating priming as a potential confounder) or anecdote, but Nick Yee's research does try to poke at this and some other alternatives. And anecdotally, I have picked up mannerisms or habits of speech I never used, but the game's animators and designers (or even third-party modders) did -- that's not quite the same thing when I wasn't really pretending to be the character so much as controlling them outside of cutscenes, but it seems like that could be close enough.
At the intermediate level, it's very easy for a character to 'get away' from you, either because of ramifications from other characterization or limitations of a format or type. You might try behaviors you'd normally never consider in those same environments, simply because it's the 'right' or 'in-character' thing. (Or maybe the character just always looks kinda goofy.)
Closer to the central claim, though, I think there is some difference between, for example, playing a character that is foo and doing foo, for wide varieties of characteristics. The latter probably is better at encouraging that specific action! But the former makes you think about the broader characteristics and motivations and how all those things would interact. Which, to be fair, is still a new behavior that's established and getting reinforcement. Just a different one.
Ah, sorry. Multiplicity/plurality is a broad category of self-identification. I don't know the topic particularly well enough to go into detail, and there's a lot of taboo words that may reflect either philosophical positions or community battles that aren't particularly obvious to outsiders: the internal phrasing is usually some variant of multiple people in one body. This seems to be one of the more popular descriptions for outsiders that I've been pointed to, though I don't know how well-regarded it is in general, or to what extent everyone covered by this definition would self-identity (eg, most LessWrong tulpamancers don't self-identity as plural).
MineCraft Quilt is a modloader that forked/derived from a different one for a variety of reasons (link is a lot of unnecessary background info), but while most were long-lasting technical problems, a big triggering incident was about as Culture War as it could get, which meant that most of the founding generation for Quilt either had very strong feelings about dependency correction or were very specifically pro-trans.
Add in some evaporative cooling, and you get a very Blue Tribe community. But there's a lot of subcultures in the Blue Tribe, including some things that weren't well-known even among a lot of fairly strongly left-leaning people to start with. One of the matters that was both very visible (in part because of a couple serious code contributors) and didn't readily slot into widerspread community norms was multiplicity/plurality. (And not just in the funny ways like inviting a bunch of debates over the singular 'they'.)
These were not specific to (or even particularly well-known before within) the MineCraft or modded MineCraft community. There's been some livejournal and dreamwidth communities from these people dating back to the late 00s, to my knowledge -- I'd seen them on the edges of the therian/otherkin communities for a while then. Quilt's just one of the first places I've seen where a) it was taken as a rule that it needed to be honored, to the point of having integrated Discord tools to assist, and b) interacted with people that were majority not-plural, plural-curious, or in a weird adjacent community (eg therians, otherkin, people building tulpas).
As I understand it, this would be in effect only while you wear the avatar. I interpreted the sentence I responded to
as being about long-term effects. The short-term effects are interesting, but I dont see how they would lead to the character taking over in the off-time.
I somewhat agree, depending on what you imagine for "just doing foo". If you get told what to do over earbuds, thats less dangerous than "playing a character" normally. I would say this is because in the latter case youre figuring out what to do, and that way of figuring out can be reinforced. I dont think its essential for that figuring out to involve thinking about some character.
And I think this is essentially the same way normal behaviour changes in an environment: You go in with somewhat different mood/disposition each day, and some of them get more positive reinforcement than others.
BTW, I think often doing a specific action is not the best way of encouraging it. Many actions lie at a point within the decision tree that youd never normally get to, and training that last step more wont help.
There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments (eg here or, while less directly tied to the avatar, 'game transfer phenomena discussions of behaviors and habits do seem close). I think the science tends to be weaker, especially garden of forking paths problems, and they tend to only measure on scales of days rather than months or years, but it does match my experiences.
Now, these are usually small and fairly trivial things, and sometimes not even matters you'd consider character (or, conversely, are Character in the Calvin's Dad sense), so it's fair to say there's still a long way from the sort of mode changes that the OP was motioning around. But I think it's a quantitative rather than qualitative difference.
That's reasonable.
Well yes, if we believe in reinforcement or some other mechanism like that, that can carry the short-term consequences into the long term. But there the proteus effect is not an alternative way that the character can take over long term. All the stuff about the mechanism of it suggests it doesnt have an independent long-term effect.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's a name I haven't seen in a long time. It's a shame he pivoted his academic virtual social research into a gaming market research firm. The rest of the Terra Nova writers had less interesting content over the years. I think Castronova has been flogging the same virtual economics concept unchanged for something like 20 years now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
@gattsuru, please correct me if I’m missing something.
Quilt is a fork of Fabric, one of the main modding tools for Minecraft. It split in part because of drama involving ”plurality,” or multiple personalities in one body. The issue was not so much that concept as it was the moderation response to criticism, but I’m less clear on the specifics.
I think plurality/multiplicity/headmates pushes the boundaries of “new behavior.” Or rather—it is adequately described from the outside as an adopted behavior, but proponents will fight tooth and nail to tell you that’s not the case. That their personalities have distinct values and goals, and must not be treated as an affectation. They may benefit from social accommodations such as xenopronouns or discord bots.
One thing led to another, and Quilt seceded to make their own modloader, with blackjack and redesigned moderation. My understanding is that this involves a lot of workflow and API improvements, too, and is not just a political maneuver. In theory it’s the free (-open-source-software) market in action: if you don’t like the management, head out and make your own improvements.
In practice, critics view it as the continuation of politics by other means. Technical improvements made by Quilt are inseparable from its weirder stances. I have no idea how the cost-benefit works out for the broader Minecraft modding community.
I'd caveat that Quilt mostly split over more conventional trans-specific Culture War. If you want the exact background, here and here (cw: discussion of suicide) are the Quilt-favorable perspectives on the events, though I'll caution that they're a long and very inside-baseball read.
((Also some even more boring problems related to bikeshedding: literally a year of Fluid API attempts.))
The increasing recognition of multiplicity/plurality stuff seems to have been a downstream effect of evaporative cooling and a few of the early Quilt coders (I think gdude? and silver?) being plural or plural-adjacent, and having roles early on that made it easier to bring up or turn into community rules or norms. But afaik the whole thing was little more than a curiosity for Fabric even early into the split.
In the end, both Quilt and Fabric are a bit of a rounding error for total users: the biggest Quilt and Fabric mods gets tiny download counts, and those are often straight clones or ports of their Forge equivalents. There's interesting stuff happening in places, but they're more for the programmer and friends than a general category of users.
There's a not-implausible argument that they've encouraged better behavior from LexManos and Forge -- at the very least, Forge is a lot more willing to work with people now than in the 1.7-1.12 era, especially for ASM/mixins -- but at the same time the increasingly fractured community makes it hard to work or onboard newcomers. I've got hopes that Quilt may try to solve a few dependency problems (mostly resolution, but also a variant of the diamond problem) that wouldn't be possible for Forge to force or practical for Fabric's design team, but it hasn't really done that yet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Scroll down to the "real life" section and you'll find examples of actors who allegedly struggled to get out of character.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LostInCharacter
More options
Context Copy link
Rachel Dolezal.
More options
Context Copy link
If you're this skeptical then I don't understand why you would say 'gender identity' exists at all.
Given the current controversy over the game Hogwarts Legacy because of J.K. Rowling and trans issues, that thing that never happens just happened again. Even better, and to show that reality is indeed stranger than fiction, there's a J.K. Rowling connection:
I have no idea if there will be another attempt to "No True Scotsman" this person as "not really trans" (and believe me, the irony that all this is happening in Scotland is not lost on me) particularly since it involves a missing child - an eleven year old girl - but if we are to blame "predatory men" who are not really trans, then how do we distinguish the "really trans" people, given that the origin stories are so similar? Whether or not the rapist 'Isla Bryson' is really trans or just pretending, he (if that is the correct term) seems to have learned off the correct origin story to tell: knew he was trans since he was four, never had the confidence to transition until in his late twenties, all the rest of it.
This new case of Andrew Miller/Amy George, who seems to have operated online identities as both male and female, can't be tidied away under the carpet because okay, he came out late in life - like other trans people. If "you're trans if you say you're trans" is the approach recommended, then how do we distinguish "okay, this person claiming to be trans is just faking it", especially since (as I have said before) years back we were told "no guy is ever going to pretend to be a woman in order just to get into women's spaces, it's too costly".
Looks like some guys are indeed pretending, unless this is just a lurid tabloid story:
If you read the study it's somewhat more complicated and complex than that, but certainly some women prisoners have had bad experiences with transgender prisoners.
What's my point? I don't know if I have one; certainly my position on transgender rights/activism has hardened a lot, given the go-to accusations of being a TERF if you have the slightest qualms about putting male-bodied people into spaces with female-bodied people; the crying about 'medical gatekeeping' which did sound reasonable because of the way earlier psychiatrists did place demands on transgender patients but, with cases like the above, is now sounding more and more like a demand that cannot and should not be met that there should be no medical certification or barrier to getting puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery; and the exaggerations about 'literally killing me and my friends' and trans genocide
I've heard of "systemic racism", is "systemic genocide" a thing now? "No we don't mean Rowling is literally building death camps and rounding up trans people to put them in those places, but she is guilty of wrongthink which is the same thing in essence"?
Whatever good will ordinary people had, I think extreme cases like this, which should never have been entertained but were in order to pander to loud screeching activists with accommodations and humouring them, are burning it all up, and the ordinary trans person who isn't a sex offender or a fetishist is going to be lumped in with these types and life will be harder than it needs to be for them.
I'm pretty sure this guy was a Fullmetal Alchemist character
More options
Context Copy link
Okay, but what’s that got to do with the price of tea in china?
The OP isn’t arguing it “never happens,” nor is he pointing out exploits or corner cases. He’s not connecting it to JKR or genocide or basically anything that you wrote about. And it wouldn’t make sense if he did, because Blanchard et al. never really come into those discussions!
I feel like you’re looking for a place to drop a rant about the latest atrocity. I don’t feel like it makes sense down here. Just do a top-level.
Are these two examples "real" transgender women or not?
If not, why not?
If they're men acting as/pretending to be women, why?
Is Blanchard/Bailey typography correct and some people do get sexual gratification out of 'becoming' women, and is that what is happening in these cases?
Because we're left with the sticky problem of "what is transgender anyway, what does it mean to 'feel like a woman', and if you do away with 'medical gatekeeping' how do you distinguish genuine transgender from pretence, fetish, or some other disorder?"
Where is the line dividing "living the part so long you come to believe it's true" versus "kids as young as two can know for sure they're trans"?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Blanchard’s typology. Bailey’s book was apparently a huge signal-boost for the idea. I can see why it’s a suggestive theory; I definitely find the idea of myself-as-a-woman more appealing than most of the other stated reasons for transitioning…relatively speaking.
Ultimately I think Blanchard oversells it. It’s easy to pattern-match the talk about gender affirmation to sexual fulfillment. But that’s the same thing Freud did with daddy issues. Just because a theory fits certain lurid, high/profile cases doesn’t mean it’s actually a realistic one.
It also doesn’t really gel with the trans women I know. If you had to be wildly uncharitable to them, you could argue that they just hated being men so much they took the Benedict Option. From what I’ve see, that’d be a better description than asserting a fetish. See also the bizarre effects of estrogen, etc. on sex drive.
As for actually answering your question—technically, you could include borderline/multiple personality disorders, psychosis, whatever. It’s not a very fair comparison, but it does meet your definition. For an alternative that’s more likely to be framed as identity, there’s headmates/DID. I…really don’t know how to talk about that. There’s a normative aspect that makes me very uncomfortable, plus I get the impression that it’s entirely happening on social media.
More options
Context Copy link
One thing that I can think of is Tulpas, where people intentionally create hallucinations of whole personalities they can talk with and see. People describe being able to "forfeit the wheel" to their Tulpa.
That is a bit of an extreme example, I think everyone has smaller examples of such things. As Will Durant said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Or as Kelly Clarkson once sang, "Now all that's left of me is what I pretend to be."
If you set out to be someone who likes Romcoms, focusing your attention on the good parts of Romcoms, ignoring the bad parts, forming a habit of watching Romcoms periodically, one day you will genuinely like Romcoms. Or Homestuck, or Golf, or Multivariable Calculus. There are limits to habit forming, but we form ourselves every day by our thoughts and actions.
My favorite formulation is Vonnegut's "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hilaria Baldwin being Hispanic or Elizabeth Warren being indigenous?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link