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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Another interesting thing about this all is that gender is evidently a fundamental ontological category in the progressive worldview. In the same sense that the immanentized progressive egregore thinks killing black people is worse than saying the N-word, it also thinks that belonging to a gender is more enduring, significant and definitional than being a human/Gear/intelligent beast/vampire/spiritual entity/ascended demon/robot/AI/shadow clone/hivemind/talking sword/whatever. You can move through several of those transient categories, but Gender is the stable inner Gnostic truth revealed to the soul, the underpinning of the self – as discussed by @IGI-111 and others.

Regarding Testament mentioned downthread:

Arc System Works marketing rep Riku Ozawa has stated that Testament is specifically agender (無性, musei?), neither male nor female, and that the character was previously portrayed as androgynous/bigender (両性, ryōsei?), but that the team chose to change that in the new game.[38][39] Both musei and ryōsei are categories of X-gender, the Japanese equivalent of the word 'non-binary'.

In an interview, Daisuke Ishiwatari reportedly said that "They're androgynous. In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me."[39][40]

Baka creator! Can't have that transhumanist crap in our not-Christian fighting game about posthuman beings. Every character should pick a flag, a hormone stack, and a side that could be conceivably covered by the selection of bathrooms in an American school.

…Androgyny is, within certain diagnostic methods at least, not some queer notion made obsolete by the modern gender theory, but the psychological opposite of agenderism, or perhaps simply orthogonal as far as nomenclature goes.

In psychology, androgyny refers to individuals with strong personality traits associated with both sexes, combining toughness and gentleness, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour, as called for by the situation. Androgynous individuals are more likely to engage in cross-sexual behaviour than those who maintain traditional sex roles. The rise of feminism and the influence of the women’s rights movement made certain aspects of androgynous behaviour more socially attractive than in the past. Androgynous figures occurred frequently in Greek mythology, often embodying a blend of desirable male and female characteristics. The blind seer Tiresias, a figure of great wisdom, was sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite.

Laaame. Who cares about attractive sides and personality traits? Tells us your pronouns and what kind of sterilization you need.

Is transhumanism being downplayed against transgenderism among progressives? That seems to be what you imply here.

I think transhumanism is a progressive (in the classical non-partisan, capabilities-increasing sense) ideology/sensibility, and there can be transhumanist-friendly transgenderism, but as it stands those are incompatible paradigms, with the latter having been absorbed into political leftism that's basically a zero-sum game to redistribute finite and indeed actively diminished resources, in the same camp as degrowth ecologists and race baiters. More to the point, transhumanism has another, also somewhat Gnostic notion of the self, e.g. see me here:

I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.

For now, the question to check is «would you be okay with a pill that magically restores sex-typical gender perception and orientation and other phenotypic aspects, or would you vehemently reject it and indeed try to prohibit it».

I'll hopefully expound on that at some point or we'll talk with @self_made_human and @TheDag and others and figure it out together.

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