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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Wesley Yang (coined "Successor Ideology") interviews Corinna Cohn, former trans activist, now regretting his (born male, now prefers male pronouns) transition as a teenager in the early 1990s.

I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects. Might be wrong, haven't yet checked.

Now Cohn acknowledges being male and rejects his transition, but for health reasons remains on estrogen treatment. I suppose there is some question of what it means to be a detransitioner. Wesley Yang is well equipped to tear into this lamb, and does so, as far as I can tell. This is gonna hurt.

I have only read the posted transcripts, a tiny sliver. An excerpt:

On Affirming Parents

Corinna:

“For every parent who is transitioning their child, here's the future: your kid is going to get into their 20s and 30s. somewhere in this range. Even the ones who are failing to launch are going to figure out how to actually get their shit together at some point. Every one of these kids is going to start to ruminate. “How did this happen to me?” None of them are going to say, “Why did I do this to myself?” Because they didn't have agency. They didn't know. It doesn't matter if they said, “Oh, I really, really, really want to be a girl, mommy.” They don't know. They've got no idea. They're not even going to remember that. Right? They're not going to know that.”

“They're going to start thinking — “How did this happen to me?” And they're going to get to know kids. They're going to get to know children. Newborn babies. They're going to be involved with the lives of these children. They're going to watch them grow up and become thinking human beings. They're going to even watch them become adults. And they're going to know what innocence looks like. And they're going to start to remember that their innocence was absolutely destroyed.

And they're going to want to know why. And they will know at the time — I'm telling, I'm telling you now that the reason that this happens is largely because of the sexual interests of men like Rachel Levine, Admiral Levine, and other men who have continual fantasies that they wanted to be little girls”

So you have you have sent these children to satisfy the fantasies of these men. These children when they become adults are going to realize that this is why their innocence was destroyed: to make these fantasies come true. And the first people who will get the blame for this will be their parents. That is the future. That is the future.

Wesley: So I don't remember his name, bu he's like, “I'm 28 Look at me. I'm puberty blocked…”

Corinna. That was Seth.

Wesley: That was so powerful. And you're saying like, that's gonna happen to all these fucking parents?"

Corinna: Yes. It will not matter to these adult children…

Wesley: …that they begged and demanded and connived in order to get this is…

Corinna: I’m not even talking about that part. It won’t matter to these kids that their parents’ calculus was they want zero of one child to commit suicide. They don't care about one in 20,000. They want zero of one to commit suicide.

They won't care about their parents’ concerns. A lot of them aren't going to be able to have their own kids and so they're never going to even learn how to think like a parent. They're always going to think like a child. They're not going to appreciate what their parents were up against — being lied to by the government. Being lied to by their president being lied to by their doctors.

They're going to think “my parents ruined me.” For what? Why did my parents did my parents do this to me

So parents: that's what you have to look forward to.”

Corinna is no lamb at all. This is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.

I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects.

Are you thinking of Coraline Ada Ehmke?

Could be. I have a vague recollection of like 3 or 4 like minded individuals from that era.

100% people meant Ehmke. I've never heard of Cohn.

Ada initiative and Ehmke earned a lot of negative attention, however.

I couldn't find any reference to Cohn from more than a few years ago.

I feel like the debate around gender identity and the debate around surgical/medical intervention are almost two different things.

I'm personally pretty comfy with people identifying how they want, but I feel that the current iteration of hormonal & surgical intervention has a horrific risk-reward where it's like lifelong issues in exchange for maybe if you are a bodytype that's already leaning towards your preferred gender, being able to pass from a distance at certain angles.

This is going to sound intentionally absurd, but I'd almost prefer a world in which people just got their preferred gender pronouns tattooed onto their forehead and then everybody hypothetically just went along with it, than the current state of corrective therapy.

What do you mean, the gender identity ('born in the wrong body') is justifying the surgery. Also the gender identity stuff is an incoherent belief system that is being taught in schools and mandated in workplaces.

The irony is that having a sex category, being an immutable fact, allows for any manner of expression. It is gender identity where the individual is forced to show social proof of membership, typically confirming to regressive sex stereotypes in order to do so.

What do you mean, the gender identity ('born in the wrong body') is justifying the surgery. Also the gender identity stuff is an incoherent belief system that is being taught in schools and mandated in workplaces.

Is it, though? A world in which the gender surgery actually accomplished what was on the tin I'd agree, but as-is it's kind of a shambles

Yes, that's what I mean, 'is justifying it in the confused minds of the people who are immersed in the ideology'.

Corinna is no lamb at all. This is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.

So if Yang is a wolf and Corinna is a wolf, who is the lamb?

In a separate vein, I suppose as a society we've aught to figure out what to do with a bunch of infertile, underdeveloped, and purposeless/telosless young people. The usual modes of hedonism I am pretty sure aren't going to an option for this class so it is likely that left alone they go to even more anti-social routes. Any ideology that picks them up is going to have people who have fire and will not age-out of it.

I hope I don't have to impress upon you how much of problem that will become...

The one saving grace is that the recent spike in trans medicalisation seems to be primarily concentrated in adolescent females (ROGD, social contagion etc.). Governments have less to fear from a cohort of infertile, underdeveloped and purposeless females driven to anti-social behaviour than they do from a cohort of infertile, underdeveloped and purposeless males.

Is this after they've been dosed with Testosterone for years or no?

I still don't think a group of trans men on T for a few years poses nearly as much of a threat as a group of males. Has there even been a single example of a trans man who was able to compete (not even win) in male sporting events?

We're going to see. So far only one FTM mass shooter. (Anyone saw that manifest? Even rdrama or kiwi farms doesn't have it?)

People with male hormonal profile and personality disorders are more violent than normal men, no?

about four years ago there was another publicized FTM mass school shooter

The school is suing to stop the manifesto release, IIRC. Chances are it implicates them in something or other.

Apparently, not the school but parents of children enrolled.

Bizarre.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/09/audrey-hales-parents-transfer-manifesto-to-school/

The baseless speculation I've seen is maybe a bombshell about bullying or molestation at the school. Something that makes the school administration or teachers seem horrible. And playing into the false narrative that the Columbine shooters were retaliating for bullying, but maybe real and plainly stated in the manifesto.

Isn't the idea of blocking publication of manifestos in order to discourage putative school shooters? You won't get your long complaint published, people won't be reading it and sympathising with you, you won't get the fame you want, you'll just be one more loser.

Isn't the idea of blocking publication of manifestos in order to discourage putative school shooters?

Yes; the problem is that it's not a blanket ban.
Manifestos by [demographic] for whom the demand for violence exceeds the supply get published, doubly so if they're anti-regime; others won't get national media exposes (if the police department is even-handed it won't release anything, but that's more common in Red areas and Red PDs as either way they lose- either they fuel the meme and make more parallel-killers, or they release it and further their enemy's meme of "Red tribe's culture caused this, Red culture bad, ban Red to be safer").

Won't they just gets cats and wine like the current cohort of post-fertility women with fake email jobs?

You have been warned before about this kind of low-effort booing. You've got a long string of these and it seems to be all you post, so this time your ban is a week. You probably have 0 to 1 more strikes before it becomes permanent.

So if Yang is a wolf and Corinna is a wolf, who is the lamb?

The strawman of trans ideology, that which is pushed by activists, and worse, activist-practitioners. I might not disagree with the steelman of trans ideology, but the lamb is the reality of gender-affirming care at this moment in the US, as I understand it.

Trans is an unusually high profile example of, perhaps the most high profile example of, American society’s peculiar loathing for saying ‘no’ to adolescents and for people who do so, but it is very definitely not the only one. Everything from choice of college major to choice of gender to even table stakes things like choice of fashion- parents are told over and over again that their job is to affirm whatever their adolescents want to do even if it’s obviously stupid.

And trans is downstream of that! Obviously parenting of 12-21 year olds involves lots of saying ‘no, quit being stupid’. But when parents already think they’re doing screwing up by it, the narrative of ‘you’re killing your kid!’ Just takes better.

It's not even 12 year olds, that's positively ancient by comparison with "how can you tell if a pre-verbal child is trans?" and getting told "if they pull the barrettes out of their hair or open their onesie to look like a skirt" by the expert who is helping to set national policy on trans issues.

Timestamp for the question about pre-verbal children. And that was from back in 2016.

I think that you might not be seeing the forest for the trees. The vast majority of adolescents in the US are forced to go to school whether they want to or not, which is a 40 hour a week involuntary commitment. Also, helicopter parenting is common at least among the middle and upper classes. Minors in the US are actually pretty constricted in what they are allowed to do. I mean, even the barbaric practice of parents getting their sons circumcised is legal in this country.

Americans have never liked the idea of saying no. I’ve often thought of it as a sort of Achilles heel for our version of western civilization. We aren’t the people of “you have to earn it”, and “work hard” or even really delaying gratification. It’s something I tend to admire a bit more in older societies and often East Asian societies. You are not simply handed things. If you don’t earn it or aren’t good enough to have it, you don’t. And they generally don’t see themselves as exceptions to the rules. You aren’t allowed to bring a dog or food into a building, you don’t. You don’t try to argue about how the rules don’t apply to you.

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