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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Breadtube Rowling videos so you can comb through them for receipts, I guess I can. But I've done that a lot and people mostly say 'I'm not going to watch that'.

Yeah, because watching video of people I hold in contempt is not something I'm going to subject myself to. That's your hobby, not mine.

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.

If this is blood libel, then jews really do drink the blood of Christians. You can't say that the rapist isn't a pervert, that he isn't trying to prey on women by being imprisoned among them instead of other men, where he belongs. We know he raped a little girl. We know that he doesn't actually believe he's a woman, and he's doing it cynically. ou can't just say something true is blood libel, when I can see how true it is with my own lying eyes. You have to do more to actually convince me that these trans men aren't perverts, because they sure do look like it to me, and simple denial doesn't move the needle.

The fact that, after establishing that worldview and narrative, you don't vocally take the next step of saying 'and therefore we need to eradicate transgender people from the culture as a whole' is sort of irrelevant.

Eradicate? No, fix. But you're right that in an ideal world, the number of trans people is 0. It's a perversion, too, and not one that I like to see spreading.

Eh, that’s the motte-and-bailey, isn’t it?

a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them,

gets watered down to

You can't say that the rapist isn't a pervert,

No shit, the convicted rapist of this example is a pervert grasping at any opportunity to keep hurting women. His credibility went out the window because of the crime.

Is the least sympathetic rapist representative of the broader category of trans people? Keep in mind that many of them are aggressively disinterested in sex, perhaps on account of the long-running hormone therapies. Are the dreaded trans youth all rapists, desperate for an excuse?

I don’t think so. You’re making the same judgment as the woman who, after a bad date, concludes that men are scum. Not all men. Not all transwomen.

Side note: I agree with you that YouTube videos, especially those made by your opponents, are incredibly unappealing. No matter how succinct and reasonable it is, the argument would be better served by a text document. And there is zero incentive for wannabe documentarians to make their work short.

The problem is not "all trans women are male pervert rapists", that's definitely not true.

The problem is "you must not misgender the rapist, so when the victim describes the alleged crime, you must edit the coverage to be they raped me not he raped me".

Another reported a trans woman physically forcing her to have sex after they went on a date.

"[They] threatened to out me as a terf and risk my job if I refused to sleep with [them]," she wrote. "I was too young to argue and had been brainwashed by queer theory so [they were] a 'woman' even if every fibre of my being was screaming throughout so I agreed to go home with [them]. [They] used physical force when I changed my mind upon seeing [their] penis and raped me."

Sure, sure. No objections here. Rape bad.

You and KMC are not arguing the same issue as guesswho. He insists that making hay about prison rapists is an excuse to build outrage against a law-abiding majority. I don’t think you’re going to convince him otherwise by making more hay about prison rapists.

I understand that you are genuinely concerned about the rapist situation, which makes further concessions very unappealing! And guesswho shouldn’t expect to convince you otherwise by dancing around the issue.

It’s not a very productive conversation. Y’all are both producing the wrong kind of evidence.

From my side of this debate, what I perceive is all the demands for concessions from us, but no concessions on their side. The prison rapists are a stupid case, but it's precisely because of activism forcing lawsuits that "if I say I'm a Real Lady, you have to put me into the women's prison" is even possible in the first instance. I'd love to forget all about those, if only the trans rights bunch would admit "okay, yeah, there in fact are certain standards about what is a woman and what is not and who is trans and who is not". But they line up behind the chancers and scammers who take advantage, and won't purge them or distance themselves from them, so I don't trust the activist side an inch on "we only want to be able to use the bathroom".

Is the least sympathetic rapist representative of the broader category of trans people?

Is the edge representative of the axe? No, of course not. But it is part of the axe, and the most dangerous part.

Is the least sympathetic rapist protected by the broader category of trans people?

Are the dreaded trans youth all rapists, desperate for an excuse?

No, but their demands for rights and respect are directly impacting the criminals, and the women who have to deal with them. Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women. Saying they are, combined with saying that anyone who claims to be trans is trans, directly leads to this outcome. It obviously directly leads to this outcome, so much so that it was dismissed as a straw man before these policies were implemented. Well the scarecrow came to life, and we're not in Kansas.

Trans women are not women, have never been women, and will never be women.

Transwomen aren't even transwomen. In their quest to deconstruct gender in order to grant themselves accommodation within that same genderscape that they disavow they have inadvertantly demonstrated that it's transgenderism itself that carries no semantic water. That is to say; there's no such thing.

Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man. Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.

Either it's real, and they're not it. Or it's not real, so there's no it to be.

[Obligatory olive branch that I don't care two iotas (iotes?) about men rendering themselves maximally feminine. Obligatory post script that this all applies vice versa too.]

Nevermind the old chestnut of "what is a woman?". That one has multiple satisfactory answers from the simple to the scientifically robust. Try out "what is a transwoman?". The sole universal quality of every possible rational answer begins with "a man who...". A man.

This is literally assuming the conclusion. You can't build an argument to support your opinion that starts with your opinion.

OP does go on to say:

Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.

Seems to me the argument is not circular, just compact: without a concrete definition of man and woman, there is nothing to be "trans" in comparison to.

This sort of argument is not new - a common variant is to argue that trans and non-binary are inherently in tension for this reason.

Fair enough. But then isn't this just answered by "man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"? With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases, and then still, the "a man who" argument fails to be convincing. The extended form of the counterargument then is just "you're concluding group membership by using as an argument your choice of group criteria", which is still just as circular.

(This is not a "pro-trans" view: "trans women are women" were just as silly, for the same reason, if it were an argument and not a cudgel.)

"man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"

The answer to this is that this argument proves too much. If we go by the pre-trans, biology-based definition based on biology and the type of gamete a body is geared towards producing, there are edge cases - but it's the intersex (it's telling how the intersex and language associated with them , "assigned sex at birth" , have been appropriated by trans activists) - but this small minority doesn't render the category meaningless or most biology-based categories - as a start - have to go.

With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases

Going by the biology-based definition it's easy to see how intersex are an edge case (which doesn't vitiate the category). It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition - it's not based on dysphoria since some deny that (and lack of comfort with your body doesn't change your sex in any case), not based on intersex-style biological ambiguity since most trans are not intersex, you don't need any brain scans to fit your claimed gender so it's not based on that, you don't need to transition - and then what of women who're non-conforming? Where do they fall? It's similar to the "Trans-Inclusion Problem" and "woman":

Every proposal so far has failed to draw the boundaries of womanhood in a way acceptable to the Ameliorative Inquirists, since not all those who identify as women count as women on these proposals, and some who count as women on these proposals don’t identify as women.

You complain about the inherent fuzziness of the biology-based definition of "man" and "woman" but you run a worse issue with "transpeople". You cannot say "transpeople are the edge case" when defining trans in the first place in a concrete way is a problem.

Oh, wow, look: we've basically circled back to OP's original complaint. Like I said: compact not circular.

I don't think the category is meaningless! Certainly, men and women overwhelmingly exist. However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others. And the intersex - but the intersex are much more rare than those! I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.

I think the phrasing "have to go" implies that we either have rigorously separated men and women or we cannot have men and women at all. I reject this line of thinking anyways. A group doesn't have to be total to be useful. I'm sure there are people who argue like that; I don't count myself among them.

It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition

Oh, I'll be the first to agree that the vacuous nature of the term weakens the trans case! This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition. This does not however disprove the existence of trans people; it just shows the category is fuzzy - as should be expected of a category defined as category-crossing. A sphere is inherently easier to define than a concave lens.

But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion. I think trans people have shared traits and interests that justify - make useful - the existence of the group term. I think the trans movement often fails to make this case, or make it convincingly; that doesn't make "mtf are men because I put them into that category" any better; it just shows the error is widespread and not limited to any side.

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eah, because watching video of people I hold in contempt is not something I'm going to subject myself to.

Right, and since you hold those who disagree with you on this in contempt, you'll never learn whether your beliefs are accurate or not.

That's why I stopped bothering top provide links on this topic, no one ever used them. Everyone knows how to use google if they care to learn.

If this is blood libel, then jews really do drink the blood of Christians.

This is actually a pretty stunning example of taking a quote out of context to lie about it. I reference two specific types of statements she's made in one sentence, and discuss their import in the next sentence. You take the second sentence and pretend it was referring to a completely different statement, then spend a paragraph stridently mocking how dumb it would be as a discussion of that different statement.

I'm going to be charitable and assume that you couldn't bear to read my whole post carefully because o the contempt thing and just got honestly confused, rather than concluding that this is intentional slander. But it sure doesn't make me hopeful about the EV of this conversation going forward.

Eradicate? No, fix. But you're right that in an ideal world, the number of trans people is 0.

I have someone you should talk to.

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And, like, come on, you're obviously underselling what she says herself and what the implications of that are. She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces. She says that she is glad trans didn't exist when she was growing up because she might have been socially infected with it and it would have ruined her life. Etc.

These types of things are the blood libel of the trans debate; they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them, and where trans identity is merely an infectious meme that needs to be stamped out before it takes more lives.

The things she's saying are blood libel. That's what you wrote. There was nothing disingenuous about my response to your hysterical escalation. If you think I'm not being fair, then you need to explain how Rowling's previous comments are blood libel, but her current ones aren't, and therefore how my interpretation is disingenuous.

But that's not what you wrote, and that's not the meaning of what you wrote. "These things" can very reasonably be read to include Rowling's most recent comments, and in fact it requires that it be read that way because otherwise it is irrelevant.

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