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Notes -
(part ii of ii)
This massive disparity in strength and ability to do violence is why men are inherently scary to women, and a key reason why we create dedicated female spaces whether it be sports teams or locker rooms or sleepovers. The need to make distinctions between girls areas and boys areas are rooted in basic biology, not some amorphous sense of 'gender' in the brain.
And it's not just acute strength -- injury rate is a huge issue. When the Marine Corp was studying women in entry-level infantry training, the women had an injury rate 600% higher than the men. Women troops carrying combat loads were one hundred times more likely to develop pelvic stress fractures. Women soccer players are 400% to 600% more likely to tear an ACL.
When Los Angeles made a push to hire female fire fighters back in the 2000s they could hardly find any women who made it through their training:
They eventually had to drop the standards for women. When Army Rangers made a push to add women there as a big headline when a few finally passed -- and then it came out a few years later they had to cheat. Perennial gold medal contending Canada's women hockey team trains by playing in a regional boys high school league -- and ended up in the middle of the pack -- even though checking is banned when they play the boys because they don't want the women getting hurt by the boys. The best adult women's soccer team in the world has gotten soundly beat by a 14 year old boy academy team from Dallas.
The physical differences are such that men will always be the ones who carry the physical default load in physical matters from construction to combat to packing up the car.
Thus, raising a boy to be a man means preparing him for this world. It means that women will expect the men in the life be the physical protectors, it means women will always have someone more discomfort around strange men because of the potential for them to use overwhelming physical force.
The third thing of importance in sex distinction is the potential for sexual intercourse.
From time-to-time, I sometimes do an overnight getaway and spend a night out on the town with an old friend, maybe I crash on his couch, etc. As a married man, I feel like this would be very inappropriate to do with a woman. Even if I had certainty that it would be entirely chaste, it would cause my wife anxiety. But I also don't even want to lead myself into temptation. Writer Te Ne Hasi Coates put it well:
Even forming a deep friendship where you are spending a lot of 1-on-1 time and spilling your guts is a dangerous proposition between any man and any woman. The potential for sex is there. Back home, a husband and wife are caught up in the grind and conflict of running a household and doing hard things together. Time away spent purely in fun with a woman friend might seem magical...temptation would arise... From everything I've heard, deep one-on-one time with someone of the opposite sex is the fast road to ruining a marriage.
The potential for sex also leads to the potential for crossed-signals and uncomfortable situations. A friendly gesture to a man could be seen as a come-on to a woman.
Thus from the very moment I meet someone it is very important to know what biological sex they are, because it will define everything about our future relationship. A male saying to me after I have met him a party, "Hey you like the Sharks too? I happen to have tickets next week, wanna come?" is very different than a woman saying the same thing. This is why every successful culture has language and norms of dress that make distinctions based on biological sex. (This is also why it has been normative for gay men and lesbians to dress in ways that would readily identify themselves).
The temptation issue is also why I would never allow my daughter when she is 14-years old to go on a sleepover alone with any guy. It's not so much about the guy being a potential "rapist" -- it's about the very real possibility they both could be succumb to temptation.
Thus there will be possible situations in the future when I must treat Skylar as a boy. Maybe we are doing a trip with friends and Jessica and her girlfriend are in another room and we have another room that is a boys room. Skylar cannot be in the girls room, sexually he is a boy.
And these issues become more acute when we have nudity involved, which is why we have norms around modesty and why we separate locker rooms. Men don't want to have to fight off getting a boner because some biological woman is in their locker room. Women don't want to feel vulnerable from seeing a much stronger person with his cock hanging out seeing her naked. Even if most men and most male-to-female trans people would never rape, by making "femaleness" a matter of self-identification and by normalizing allowing people with dicks hanging out in a women's locker room, there is no way to keep out actual creeps and rapists who will cynically abuse the policy.
Sex also matters for group dynamics. For instance, I was in a gaming group. We had a young woman join who was very much into the stereotypical nerdy games that guys were in. All went well...until one the core guys of the group offered to walk her home one night. This guy was not at all a sleaze. He likely did want to date her as she was a catch. But she got uncomfortable, and then in other events didn't want to invite him. The entire group dynamic was ruined. When Harry Met Sally proven right again: "The sex thing always gets in the way."
For all these reasons, biological sex matters from the moment we meet a person. The potential for long-term relationship, the nature of that relationship, the meanings of requests, changes based on sex. That is why our society (and almost every successful society) makes basic distinctions between the sexes in names, language, and apparel. These norms are linked at core to biological sex not to some nebulous notion of 'gender identity' inside the brain.
I believe that men and women have a deep need for spending at least some time in sex segregated clubs. And this is rooted in biology in all the biology I noted above, that men and women have different strengths to develop and challenges to overcome. When you add just one opposite person to a group the dynamic changes -- immediately you get status posturing, sexual drama, and white knighting.
When I say with regards to a person 'he is a boy' the words 'he' and 'boy' refer to biological sex, as the words always have meant in the English language up until a few years ago.
This is an important matter of personal integrity. Boy, girl, man, woman, male, female are immutable aspects of human biology. Many schools and doctors are now teaching a false and poisonous doctrine, that a person can be born in the 'wrong' body and that medical intervention can fix this. It is important for me to be a rock for truth in kids lives -- the schools are wrong, you cannot change your sex, your healthiest life will always be by adjusting your mindset to find a good way to live with your sex.
FIN
I think that 1) can be true to a greater or lesser degree and 2) is...we are not good at all at changing this. Our medical technology is deeply inadequate; if it was better (say, lab-grown bodies) it wouldn't mean much.
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If your subject is not a very online Mottelike person who loves as it has been put "words, words, words" then don't use this approach at all.
Talk to him in person, and have a conversation about how it feels, base it in emotion. Losing a son, how does that feel? What dreams did he have for his son? What things did he want to do together, that a daughter is less likely to do, like hunting and fishing.
He will likely counter that his daughter might like fishing too. But the seeds will be sown. He has to change his own mind.
Feelings trump facts when it comes to persuasion and changing hearts.
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I don’t think you’re going to get maximum traction by emphasizing gender roles, dating strategy, and especially intercourse. Parents do not want to think about that for their kids. I’d go as far as to say most people who aren’t Internet autists don’t like to frame gender dynamics as realpolitik. It’s more likely to trigger disgust than sympathy.
No, you’re going to get the most mileage out of object-level arguments. This kid has no framework to understand what he’s asking. Encouraging him to follow a specific trend is just borrowing trouble. Of course, making it the Biggest Deal Ever is creating your own trouble when he hits teenage rebellion. You need a middle ground where you let him do cringy stuff without committing himself to the bit. If he wants to braid his hair, boy, he’s going to learn that lesson fast, whatever you do.
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While I don't know the exact details of your situation, I would be extremely wary of including any "theory portion" in this sort of email. Unless you regularly have the sorts of abstract discussions of social and political issues with this person that we do here, and I quite doubt that if you say he has never been exposed to these counter-arguments, I don't see how it will make you look like anything other than a crazy right-wing conspiracy theorist in his eyes.
It was pointed out in a previous thread that we can map this issue onto two axes. One is the practical axis, dealing with real world actions: what pronouns we call people, the details of sex-change surgeries, who can play in what sports leagues, etc. The other is the metaphysical axis, dealing with our theory of the world: the definitions of man or woman, whether the interests of each sex are in eternal conflict, what gender identity feels like, etc. If your goal is to prevent a specific action in the real world and not to change someone's fundamental beliefs (and the truth is most people don't really have any, apart from the autists that congregate in places like this), you should stay on the practical axis.
If you can convince him that there are specific, measurable harms that might come to his child if he pursues transition, then he will be forced to at least weigh the costs and benefits of this course of action. Things like medical studies about puberty blockers and the anecdotes from detransitioners that you mention in passing are much stronger arguments than anything you could possibly say about "norms, culture, and language." Like it or not, we live in a world where in some places parents could face great legal and social repercussions for standing in the way of their child coming out or transitioning, and so you need that much more evidence that going against the flow will cause their family less suffering in the end, and not in the context of joining some grand culture war struggle against biological denialism that they are never going to care about.
Thank you for your response, other commenters made similar points which I responded to here: https://www.themotte.org/post/454/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/89837?context=8#context
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My own two cents:
I, like very many gay men, went through a period of expressed gender nonconforming behavior in childhood. I don't remember that clearly, but this may have included identifying with female characters, playing with clothes and 'girl toys', and at one point even asking people to call me by a girl's name (though I don't remember this my brother told me I did this a few times). All of which I had grown out of even by the age of 8 or 9. I wouldn't say I'm happy today, or that I've ever been meaningfully happy, but I don't really experience any gender dysphoria (if anything I would like to be more masculine).
So from my own perspective, the rush to label or corral children as young as five into transition seems totally crazy. And it makes me wonder if five-year old me might not have been led down such a path by an over-enthusiastic adult eager to reward me with attention.
Parents are being scared into doing this. They are being told that if they don't do everything in their power to encourage transition, they could end up with their kid committing suicide or being taken away from them.
Do you recall why you desisted the behavior?
Myself around that age, in the early to mid 80's attempting to imitate something I seen, an animated beaver, held my hands in front to mimic it's teeth. An older cousin asked me why I was holding my hands like a faggot. There was similarly themed teasing whenever he saw me. I eventually desisted, despite support from my mother.
In what dimensions would you like to be more masculine? Are you lifting?
What keeps you from being happy?
I had an unhappy decade ~16 - 26. Some was angst or ennui. Too much alcohol, and confused sexual identity didn't help. Also only child of single functional alcoholic lesbian.
I don't really recall being teased or singled out for 'sissy behavior' beyond the general background radiation of homophobia throughout the 90s and early aughts, and there were times when I took part in it. I guess it might have been social pressure. By the time I was at the age I realized I was gay, me and my peers were mature enough to accept it.
Well, I am pretty masculine already. I work a job that is 99% straight men, and few people realize that I'm gay until I tell them. I lift weights but I'm not terribly accomplished at it - I don't feel like I obviously look like I lift weights. But of course, I do feel like I've missed out on some things - interests in cars and sports and stuff like that. I think nearly all gay men have a bit of a chip on their shoulder about their masculinity - consider all the gay men who have written extensively on the nature of masculinity from all sorts of perspectives, Yukio Mishima, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Jack Donovan. We fetishise masculinity and covet it because we feel excluded from it.
I'm not happy for fairly straightforward reasons. No relationship/family/career/achievements and at 31 little prospect of having any of these things. My own fault, of course, for reasons that go beyond my sexuality, which I've never experienced any kind of confusion or anxiety over.
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Honestly, just making this point in isolation is likely to have much more of an effect than firing a manifesto at the guy.
It gives him an alternative that cannot easily be written off as (well-articulated) bigotry.
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I agree with a lot of what's here, even much of the stuff I'd advice you to cut. The gender war framing at the beginning is burning your credibility to for the very same reasons it's describing, it comes off as whining. If you have a rapport with this person and know this will be well receive feel free to overrule this criticism but you really come off as fighting the culture war and aren't really hitting on the most glaring contradictions within gender ideology. Even the part you went in with the real physical difference is defenseless against "so what? she'd be an unusually strong girl, what's the problem?". Very little of this even touches on the question of gender ideology, the idea that a five year old(or really anyone of any age) can meaningfully differentiate between girl and boy qualia, which is much more viscerally ridiculous and more difficult to dismiss as culture waring.
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Most people aren’t going to read something this long, or if they do, they’re not going to give careful consideration to every point. Are you used to having these sorts of involved theoretical discussions with this particular person?
If he’s the type of guy who’s considering the possibility of transitioning his 5 year old in the first place, then a lot of the stuff you wrote about innate gender differences is probably firmly outside of his Overton window and might just turn him off.
I would just keep the messaging simple and direct: men are not women, and men cannot become women. His son is male, not female. Medical transition is a long, costly, and traumatic experience that does irreversible damage to your body, and it’s not something a parent should put their children through. Kids say all sorts of random things that are false and make no sense. He should tell his son the truth, instead of playing along with fantasies he might be having. After simply being told “no, you’re not a girl, you’re a boy”, the kid will probably forget about it in a week.
Start with something short and simple and let him ask questions and probe further if he wants to. Have the conversation irl if possible, instead of over text.
Yeah that's what I did at first, unfortunately, he was was more bought into modern gender theory than I expected. I explained a bit more in another response about what the actual situation is: https://www.themotte.org/post/454/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/89837?context=8#context
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I have to say I don't find this line of argument persuasive at all. Your arguments could just as easily used to justify and support youth transition. "Given all these massive biological and social differences between men and women, it's critical you socially transition your five-year-old as soon as possible and get them on blockers and hormones so you can minimize the mismatch between who they feel they are and how they are perceived by others."
To me it's the opposite argument that's far more persuasive: society today treats men and women pretty much equally and allows them to express themselves how they choose. Given this freedom and flexibility, there's no reason why a boy who wants to wear dresses and play with Barbies needs to become a girl. Just let him be a boy who wears dresses and plays with Barbies. Teach your son he can be as masculine or feminine as he wants to be without getting hung up on sex and gender.
Yeah I think this is the path. As @Primaprimaprima said focus on the harms and the mental illness etc etc.
But he can let the boy be as feminine as he wants. It’s likely this is a phase anyway.
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I think I would place less emphasis on the broader knockdown of transgender ideology in its entirety, and more on the specifics of this case. The kid is five, five year olds are easily influenced by trends, fads, and whims, and do not excel at long term planning. Even if it were possible to literally be born in the wrong body and change your sex to fix that, a five year old is going to have no idea how to diagnose that and commit to that. They have no idea what that even means. It is at least 99% likely that the kid does not have any medically recognizable form of gender dysphoria, so it's important not to commit to any changes that will be hard to walk back, even if those are just socializing as the wrong gender.
I suspect you'll have an easier time selling a plan of "Treat them as a boy for a couple years just to be safe and see what happens" than "transgenderism is entirely bogus", even if the latter is true. And convincing them of the former is 99% likely to solve the problem on its own.
Thank you for your response, other commenters made similar points which I responded to here: https://www.themotte.org/post/454/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/89837?context=8#context
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My two cents:
This is all very well-written, but you're arguing at a more philosophical level, trying to convince your friend that sex is real and gender differences matter. That's all well and good for meta arguments about transness, but you're trying to persuade him not to transition his son. If he's already prepared to do this, he will probably see in your catalog of differences a lot of evolutionary psychology and socially-prescribed roles which he may consider irrelevant for a boy who "feels" that his innermost self is a girl. I don't know, maybe these arguments will sway him, but I suspect he's too close and just worried about his son's mental health, and telling him "No, really, you gotta teach this kid to be a man!" is probably the wrong approach.
I would suggest you focus on the very real dangers of transition, and the very high probability that his son is not really "trans." How does a five-year-old even decide that? Ask a five-year-old boy if he'd like to be a girl, and probably a lot of boys, after being told it's an option, would say "Yes." At age five, being a pretty girl and playing with Barbies might seem like an awesome thing to do.
You could get a similar response by asking if he'd like to be a tiger.
He has no concept of sexuality and barely any concept of gender roles. Who even put the idea in his head that he might be a girl?
Refuse to indulge him and almost certainly he will forget about being a girl in a week.
Responding to you and a few other comments...
My full email is going to come out to 70 pages. The meat of the email is stories of the horrors of transition, testimonials of teens or parents who dealt with this but then ended up desisters, and take-downs of the 'science' and 'studies' that justify transitioning as being good for mental health. But he is asking that we call his boy a girl, and basing this a theory that sex is different than gender. So I do feel a need to explain why I reject these distinctions, and to explain what I believe and what I am teaching my family. And I want him to know these are deeply considered beliefs -- I'm not just rejecting his request because I'm being a dick or am not up to date on the latest "science" of gender. Based on my relationship with my relative, I do expect him to take time to read the whole thing. I do expect him to at least start off by taking my views seriously, because in real life I am relatively high status.
The dad is kind of a hippie and has long hair, and raised Skylar with long hair. Around age 3 the kid watched Frozen at daycare and wanted to dress as Elsa for Halloween, and started to want to wear dresses. IMO, he did not wear these dresses in a feminine way (for instance, he once told my daughter to stay back it was too dangerous while he went "monster hunting" in his dress). Then his mom started asking him every day before daycare, "Are you going to be a girl today or a boy." The mom is no woke radfem, she is mostly normie liberal, but she was involved with the LBTQ crowed in college, was a lesbian for a bit, and has friends who have transitioned, so I think the mom thought that asking the kid was a best practice. Eventually Skylar started consistently saying girl. The parents decided to socially transition him and they enrolled him in kindergarten last fall as a girl and are telling family to call him "she."
When I asked the dad one-on-one, "What do you think Skylar is?" The dad said, "I think she is who she says she is." And I said, "Um, Skylar has a penis" And the dad said, "That is sex, not gender identity." I said something like, "Don't you think it is important as a parent for help in building his identity, and not just let the kid lead, and to teaching him how to grow up to be a man." He said something about not wanting to raise a kid to conform to stereotypes. He then told me it was important to be accepting and let the child lead because otherwise later in life the kid would be at very high risk of suicide. I asked him if he was thinking of puberty blockers at some point, and he said he hadn't thought about it and hadn't looked into them. I asked him if he knew the history of the development of the concept of "gender identity" and made the point that "gender" was invented as a word by a pervert academic back in the 1950s. He was not aware of this.
The situation of my relatives seem very similar to the story described by the mom in this article: https://pitt.substack.com/p/true-believer There is now a parenting ideology where it is a best practice to let kids develop their own 'gender identity.' The mom in this article eventually came to her senses, hopefully my relatives can do the same:
You seem very confident that he will read a 70-page manifesto about why his parenting decisions are wrong and bad.
You say that you know him well enough to believe this is a reasonable expectation, but from what you've written about him and his wife, this seems unlikely to me. They appear to have embraced the view that gender is something distinct from sex that children can choose, and that denying their son his choice will damage his mental health and possibly cause him to commit suicide. Assuming he respects you enough to take your concerns seriously, I would suggest that you try prying at cracks in his worldview with some judicious Socratic dialog. Just dumping a bunch of horror stories about how he's going to maim and damage his son, however earnest and heartfelt your intentions, is probably not going to make him read all the way through until he slaps his forehead and says "You're so right, what I fool I've been!" I mean, how many people do you know who are actually persuaded at one fell swoop to alter their worldview?
I don't. I expect it to make him deeply uncomfortable and hopefully start the process of convincing himself that he needs to change his approach.
The problem is you need to have certain facts in common. If he says, "We need to affirm his gender identity otherwise it will lead to higher risk suicide." I need to be able to say, "Did you read the analysis I sent you? Did you read the actual details of the studies that were making these claims? I can walk you through it line by line if you want. Your best bet of avoiding suicide is by getting Skylar off this train." Without actually giving him an opportunity to mull it over at leisure in written form, there is no way we can agree on a common set of facts. And if at worst, he doesn't want to look at it, at least I am arguing from the moral high ground of actually putting in the work to find the truth.
Cordially, please get your head out of your buttocks and do what's best for your nephew/cousin-twice-removed/whatever. This approach is folly. You've received a unanimous chorus of feedback telling you it's folly. Do you want to save your kid relative or does that come after making the father agree with you on gender ontology?
Right now, the parents have socially transitioned the kid. The path of least resistance will be toward following the WPATH "best practices" with the the tragic result of medical transition at at age 12, unless he steps up and questions the therapists and the experts and the gets the train turned around. The dad has to become uncomfortable at some point if he is to pull the emergency brakes on this train.
Seems to me my options are:
Send a much shorter email with a few key links. Problem with this is that it only gives him a fraction of the information he needs to know, and so unlikely to make much impact in reprogramming him and budging him from his path.
Drip out a lot of content over a long period of time. Problem with this is that it draws out the conflict, and will him and maybe his wife dread seeing me
Drop a big info dump on him, tell him I'm not going to draw out the conflict, but I do hope he seriously considers everything I wrote. He will at least be exposed to the information he needs -- and hopefully that will provide the foundation to at some point step up and make the changes he needs to make.
I will admit, in my writing I do have a messy mix of emotions -- genuine concern for his son, but I also have genuine anger at him for being so effing stupid about this issue and then one time correcting my own daughter about what is a boy and what is a girl (and not just stupid -- I think I detect some amount of self-righteous pride in being more "progressive" on this matter). I'm not sure I want to completely hide this anger, as I think it is coming from the right place.
Oh lord.
I'm sorry, dude, but this approach is steeped in ego and your need to be right.
You talk of "reprogramming" him, as if he has no agency and you are a scientist trying to reverse the zombie plague that has infected his brain. Maybe this is actually how you see it, but either you're wrong, in which case you're being arrogant and patronizing and he will see through it, or you're right, in which case you are not offering a "cure," you're just staging a futile gesture that will make you feel better.
You are not focusing on the most efficacious way to persuade your friend and help your friend's child while still staying in their lives. You are focused on winning. Hell, you even want to unload on him about past petty grievances ("He said something stupid to my daughter and I need him to understand he was wrong!") and you have convinced yourself that this is the right approach because you're right, dammit.
Your friend is not on the Motte. You are not arguing with us randos on the Motte, who can dispassionately (or heatedly) parse walls of text like this and get into the weeds and analyze abstract arguments.
You are understandably emotional about this - and that's not a bad thing, I believe your heart is in the right place! - but your approach seems doomed to failure to me, and that there appears to be a near-unanimous consensus agreeing with me should give you pause. You know, if you actually think considering arguments rationally and evaluating evidence is important.
Verbally grabbing your friend by the shoulders and shaking him for 70 pages saying "Listen to me, you fool!" is not going to work. You say "He will have the evidence available to him." Sure, assuming he doesn't delete your email. You actually think because you're so "high status" that he's going to read through every word and click all those links, while you're going on about what a self-righteous wrong-headed prick he is?
Ultimately, you don't actually have any say in what he does with his son. So you're right that being That Guy who brings up how he's parenting wrong every time you see him will probably lead to him and his wife not wanting to see you. Maybe this manifesto-dump will put some cracks in his worldview. But I would strongly recommend you take a softer and slower approach, minus the "I need to reprogram him" attitude. Express to him, kindly and politely, your misgivings and some reasons why you think he's making a mistake. Tell him you understand he wants to do what's right for his son, but you hope he'll consider what you're saying. Tell him you'd be happy to talk to him in more detail about it over coffee, any time. Forget about "that one time" with your daughter that's still chapping your hide!
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The way I see it, the most reasonable goal for you here is simply to prevent the medical transition of his son. If you can fight a successful holding action until puberty hits, testosterone will likely do the rest of your work for you. What pronouns the kid uses are irrelevant. What the father thinks about gender identity is irrelevant. Let him be called genderfluid, nonbinary, queer, or whatever else as long as he doesn't get on puberty blockers. Agree with the father that if we had Star Trek perfect sex-change surgeries then it would be great to try out being a woman, but our medical technology isn't that good, and the interventions we have now will do permanent damage to his child. In 20 years nearly every man of that generation is going to have a story about some weird gender stuff that happened when they were in grade school and no one will care, as long as they didn't sterilize themselves.
This is not about you and your anger at him or at the wider societal changes going on. This is about the life of a single child. I have seen families torn apart and destroyed by matters of far less weight than this, so I can only implore you to choose your words carefully and to make it brief and to the point.
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