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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   25852 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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My political positions are ... on the same side as conservatism, at least. I think you're right, at least, that the 'culture war sticking points' aren't really moving anyone towards conservative norms - banning drag queens, not allowing gay marriage, banning abortions for poor black women, this doesn't really move us towards a more conservative society.

I think it's bad, on an individual level, for anyone who transitions. Meaningful desires aligned with their outcomes (desire for sex/romantic relationship that produces kids) are replaced with confused simulacra. And actual children (pretty important! whether you're a radical inegalitarian or a sum of hedonic state utilitarian, more people existing is good) fail to be produced.

But if you actually try to consistently pursue the underlying values that generate something like 'trans is bad', the harm actually has to come from 'not having children' - and 'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families, or those that do deciding to have 2 children. I do think that conservatives should focus on the latter, and not the former.

Unfortunately, I'm not having a rational conversation with "conservatives", the conservative movement is a huge mass of a hundred million people that hypes itself up about a whole bunch of nonsense. Just like progressives. So, idk. Maybe the only way to change things is elite persuasion, even more likely there's just not enough time to change things too much until AGI is too big of an issue.

'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families

The degree that this and other culture war issues are inserted into public schools increases the burden on conservative families with children that now feel they need to homeschool to avoid the indoctrination.

I think I've expressed my opinions on 'trans in schools' enough here (tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).

But even if schools were pivotal in causing every single trans kid to be trans, that's still less important than TFR being under replacement by a solid system of values imo. Trans is bad, sure, but there are a lot of bad things - disease, obesity, being born with low IQ, crime, popular consumer media - all of those have negative aggregate impact either on the same order of magnitude as trans or much higher. And "people not having kids, especially smart people" is just way higher.

Like, if you have an extra kid and that kid has a 5% chance of going trans, and let's do some absurd but illustrative math and say that if someone becomes trans it's not only better for them not to exist, but for a whole other perfectly good person to also not exist because being trans is just THAT bad - in expected value it's still much more important to have the kid. Kid also has a 5% chance of having some weird disease, disability, personality disorder, or whatever.

(tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).

I think the worry is not necessarily that the school starts it, it's that the school enables it by their policies. Schools allowing children to socially transition, keeping information from the parents, etc. could be a lot more influential than just seeing content.

It's not even that there's a risk the school is going to make the kids trans. It's that it's presented in school at all as anything other than mental illness.

I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere unless I write a 5000 word effortpost with a dozen tiktok, reddit, and discord screenshots each to actually convey the understanding of what it's like to be a 'trans kid' and why the school isn't relevant. And the time for that was a year or two ago anyway.

So instead, I'll go back to the above argument - put the mental effort into having an extra kid (or two, or ...) instead. Even heavily discounted, it's more important.

Or I guess working on AI or something. It probably seems like an odd tic that I keep bringing that up, but all of our moral philosophies depend on and don't make sense outside of the indefinite continuation of human life and civilization and power, and that is very much in question! If you're having a kid who will themselves have kids who will ... and so on and so on, I can see that as a divine duty of infinite importance, an unbroken chain - or, really, an unbroken interwoven net of sexual reproduction tiling the whole of your nation - of intergenerational devotion. If you have two kids who each have three kids who all starve to death because we're now to silicon as horses were to us ...

I largely don't care, what it's like to be a 'trans kid' or an anorexic, or a spaz.

I have 4 children. We may have had more if we were able to send them to a non-globohomo school. Our culture pays outsized attention to people that won't or shouldn't have children.

I've no specific fear of the earth running out of people, only running out of people competent to run and administrator modern civilization.

I will say that one outcome of normalizing trans people that I would love to see, and find plausible to expect, is more effort put into helping trans people have kids.

For MtF you can freeze sperm before beginning treatment, and help pay for IVF. For FtM you can normalize a focus on top surgery and social transition in the early years. For everyone you can further normalize the use of sperm donors and make access to IVF and adoption easier.

Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.

Honestly as time passes and things get more normalized, I would expect the rates of same-sex and trans-including couples having kids to converge on those for cis straight relationships. There's no a priori reason those people would want kids less, and a mixture of IVF and adoption and various other social maneuvers can make it possible. The only barrier is cost and access to those things, and taboos against them, all of which we can work to remove.

I mean, the a priori reason is that straight sex naturally creates children and gay/lesbian/trans sex (usually) doesn't. Not in a 'natural morality' sense, just it's a lot easier to have a 'happy accident' than to have a series of medical appointments over a year. I doubt it'll converge. (I mean, in principle, future technological developments make predicting the future on current trends ... questionable)

I was saying there's no a priori reason they would want kids less, not no a priori reason we would expect them to have less kids.

I guess my point can be restated as 'I would expect all types of couples to want the same number of kids on average, and I would expect the number of kids a couple have to converge towards the number they want over time as technology and society improves and barriers to having kids/accidental ways of getting kids are removed/mitigated.'

Also this is 'converging in the infinite limit', not making a confident claim about how fast they will converge because yeah, this is partially an argument based on extrapolating future technology and social change, which is hard/impossible.

Same-sex couples raise kids at around 56% the rate of straight couples, which is a large difference, but is not an order of magnitude different nor 'impossible' which I feel like some conservative arguments seem to imply. And for lesbian relationships it's more like 80% the rate of straight couples.

90% of straight couples in that sample are married only 50% of same sex couples are. You are also using the married stats without saying so. I was confused by your post at first since the survey you cited shows same sex couples having much lower rates of child rearing than what you claimed.

Yeah, I meant among married couples since this was a discussion about gay marriage, but you're right it would have been better for me to say that explicitly.

'trans people being .2% of the population'

Which should be "okay, majority rules, you get basic decent treatment but you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man" but instead we get Trans Day of Visibility, remember all the trans murder victims who were murdered for being trans (and not for being sex workers, which is already a hazardous occupation, or murdered in domestic violence incidents just like cis people, no it's because they were trans and no other reason).

Declare that you are a woman, with no effort at transitioning, and the 99.8% rest of us have to pretend we believe you and behave as if that's true.

Yes I agree that all of that is dumb, and I think all but .2% of the people who use this site do too, so we don't really need to be reminded, because it doesn't directly impact the more substantial discussion above.

okay, majority rules, you get basic decent treatment but you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man

That's not on offer and never has been. If it was, it would probably undermine the more radical trans activists in much the same way that the normiefication of homosexuality undermined the weirdest and most radical elements of the gay rights movement. However, until trans Bismarck comes along and sabotages the trans left by offering a compromise that aspiring transnormies can tolerate, trans activism is likely to continue to be defined by the angriest and most radical voices.

It complicates things that, as far as I understand, a trans normie probably does HRT later/not at all and thus passes worse than a radical.

See, the thing is, I think there are a lot of trans normies who just want to go about living their lives as best they can. Maybe they don't 100% pass, but they don't march around demanding that "I have a dick and a beard and I'm a woman!", so the bargain of civil treatment can be made: you don't make it impossible for me to ignore that this is not your natal sex, I'll treat you as your legal sex.

It's the weirdoes and edge cases who make the most noise and get the most attention, and nobody is willing to slap them down because "oh no, we can't do that, that would be giving in to the bigots". So the crazies get their way, and the reason people make a fuss about guys with working reproductive systems getting into women's prisons and impregnating the inmates is not because there are a large number of such cases, but because such a thing should never happen in the first place. But somebody takes a test case, a judge makes a ruling, and now the Department of Corrections have to let George (now going by Georgina) into the women's prison even though the only effort George has made is to change his name and put ribbons in his hair.

If people on the progressive side were willing to give in on "Okay, George goes to the men's prison", there would be a lot more willingness to compromise on "Okay, Sally is not the most female woman you'll ever meet, but she tries her best, so let's all get along". At least from my side of the fence; I don't care what equipment you've got in your knickers if you're using the ladies' loo, I do care about the fetishists who fantasise online about periods and tampons and accosting women in public bathrooms with such intrusive questions.

you don't get to have screaming fits in public about being a real woman/real man

Isn't the root of this that we're not able to treat them as we would when someone with another type of mental illness did this?

Treat them with the same compassion as someone with delusions or hallucinations, who are sometimes loud and unpleasant in public. Your not expected to endorse or validate in any real sense their claims, generally the public avoids these individuals when possible. I'm not going to try and argue them out of whatever their experiencing either.

@cjet79, I disagree with this point and think it's pretty bad, but am I allowed to reply and say why I think it's wrong, or would that be starting a flame war?

(and yes, I'm kind of being a shit about this, but I'm trying to demonstrate why I find your reasoning here really egregious and dangerous)

Not cjet, but I’d recommend against it.

It is absolutely possible to deliver a tactful, rule-abiding response to @FarNearEverywhere. Perhaps

I strongly disagree with your characterization, which I think is really uncharitable. There is a reasonable position where trans people get better treatment without any screaming fits. Your reaction is also disproportionate to [insert actual claims about murder rate or whatever].

You could do it. I’ve seen you take a measured approach, and it’s one of the things I appreciate most about your posts. But I assume it would not be your first reaction, both because you’re already under a lot of pressure, and because FNE has opened with her infamous signature flair for the dramatic. If you mirrored her style, I would expect it to stoke the flames.

Before you ask, yes, I would like to ask FNE to cool down as well before she starts any more fights. I know this is a sensitive topic.

FNE has opened with her infamous signature flair for the dramatic

I am an International Man Woman Person Of Mystery!

Declare that you are a woman, with no effort at transitioning, and the 99.8% rest of us have to pretend we believe you and behave as if that's true.

No, we do not, and significantly more than .2% of the population refuses to go along with the stupid charade.

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