domain:astralcodexten.com
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
just now
We need a definition of what passing means before we can test, or even properly argue over it.
Passing is on the one hand used by TRAs to mean "polite people treat me as a woman when I obviously visibly signal that I wish to be treated as such." Which almost everyone can achieve.
On the other hand, anti trans types define passing as "absolutely no outward indication whatsoever of any physical difference from a median/modal member of the target sex." Which no one achieves.
The degree to which someone passes is also dependent on context.
If I saw a tall masculine looking middle aged woman at mass, I would assume she was an unfortunate looking tall woman. Even a slight mustache wouldn't throw me off.
I assume everyone at Pride Night at my rock climbing gym may not be what they appear. The slightest hint of GNC and I'm going to be circumspect.
It would be tough to account for all that in testing.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
3m ago
Hunter Schafer would be the one I think a lot of people would point to as the pinnacle of “passing trans”. I won’t go so far as to say that Schafer looks “obviously like a man”; rather, Schafer is in a weird sort of androgynous zone. Certainly not someone I would ever see as an attractive woman, but I can imagine not clocking Schafer if I passed him on the street.
Stellula
5m ago
Has McBride done that?
No, but what he has done (until recently) was insisted on coming into the women's restroom, which is really strange behavior.
Any guy who is making a big deal about wanting to go into the women's restroom, or the women's locker-room, to the point where the speaker of the house has to address it, and women have to come out and fight to stop it is acting inappropriately.
dovetailing
5m ago
The voice is, yes, usually a giveaway. But there are a lot of masculine-looking actual women out there (even some with deeper voices) due to genetics / endocrine issues, to the point where I'd be often be uncomfortable guessing --- certainly from looks alone --- whether a given person is a lucky MtF or an unlucky actual woman if encountered out of context.
jkf
6m ago
Putin apparently now says it was an IRBM, aimed at some kind of missile factory in retaliation for Biden's long-range weapon approval:
https://weapons.substack.com/p/the-fake-icbm-ukrainian-propaganda
cjet79
7m ago
This is a problem with all life. Government is worse at this.
You still need to think about your marginal impact of getting involved. If I can do nothing about a problem whether I get involved or not then it makes no sense to worry about it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8m ago
Yeah, flashing the fake titties would be inappropriate. Has McBride done that? Or posted provocative pictures, or stolen women’s luggage, or whatever?
Last I checked, most women have their breasts even when they aren’t nursing a baby. This doesn’t lead you to assume they are sexual deviants. Unless, I suppose, you take the fundamentalist view. Would you feel better if McBride wore a burqa?
There is a whole world of impractical signals out there. I think you’re picking one to back up a mistaken intuition.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
9m ago
Putin says it's an "Oreshnik" missile and claims Western defense capabilities are useless against it.
dovetailing
14m ago
Have you never heard of gynecomastia? Estrogens produce breast growth in men, too, sometimes quite a bit of it. There are boys who have to get mastectomies because of endocrine issues, even! McBride seems to have been "trans" ever since his early 20s more than 10 years ago, so while that amount of growth would be unusual, it's not unheard of.
It's relevant because your point seems to be that McBride is just acting out a fetish in which he expects the whole world to be involved, as evidenced by his "wear[ing] fake breasts" (I assumed you meant prosthetics, though maybe you mean implants?), and if he's actually on hormones for 10 years, and made permanent changes to his body, I don't think that's very likely.
I don't think you need to insist that every MtF transsexual is just acting out a fetish in order to have a good argument against blanket letting any man who claims to be a woman into women's bathrooms. I actually agree with you on the conclusion! Bathrooms are vulnerable places and women are uncomfortable when men are in the bathroom with them, and that's a good enough reason to forbid it. You don't need to assume the worst about people in order to make the point.
(FWIW, on priors I wouldn't bet against McBride being AGP, but that's not always the same thing as just a fetish, and I would not expect someone who just has a crossdressing fetish to commit literally his whole life to the bit.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
17m ago
I'm only needed physically at work between 3 and 4 days a week at present, which helps considerably, and I have a workout plan that puts me in the gym 3 days/wk on a shifting schedule.
ABigGuy4U
19m ago
Yes, there is video footage of multiple MIRVs hitting the ground. There do not appear to be any interceptions. It looks like the MIRVs were targeted at an empty area and not any particular target, although I have heard chatter that it may have been a Ukrainian military facility. Given the apparent lack of conventional or nuclear explosives in the MIRVs, I don’t think there was any significant damage.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
21m ago
I suppose not.
Not sure how I can effectively challenge their assumption, though.
07mk
22m ago
I would kill to see some high quality studies using blinded (I'm not sure double blinding is possible, since presumably a trans person would know they're trans) trials of test subjects interacting with both trans and cis people to see just how common it is to truly "pass." Sadly, the academic political environment makes it so that basically no one who would be positioned to do the research would be interested in having an answer. And even if that were not the case, the number of trans people is so small that getting sufficiently random or representative members of that group seem likely to be impossible.
The way I think of it is that, given how incentivized the current "progressive" trans movement is to present MTF as being exactly the same as females in every way that matters, if there were some fairly significant population of MTF trans people who "pass," there would be quite a few such people who are either held up as examples or who become mini-celebs as activists for the cause. There's certainly no shortage of MTF trans people who obviously don't "pass" that you can find both online and in-person (at least in my neck of the woods around Boston) despite the fact that, again, the number of such people is very small relative to the population. The only person like that who comes to my mind is Blaire White, whom I don't follow, but who I believe isn't on the side of the "progressives" in this.
Stellula
25m ago
Are you arguing that he had a mastectomy or is post-menopausal?
And in those cases, yes I agree with you that there is a sexual attraction component to it. This seems like an example that supports my point, not detracts from it.
Let's take your example to a similar place: suppose a woman got large fake breasts implanted, and then insisted on wearing revealing clothing to a children's birthday party, or insisted on brushing them up against married men at her workplace. Would you agree that this was inappropriate?
If somebody wants to wear...whatever they want, in their own private home, then by all means they should and nobody should interfere with them. Even if they want to wear just about whatever they want out in public, that's fine too (to an extent).
The problem here is that there are women who are clearly requesting not to be involved in the bathroom part of the fantasy, and there are people want to force them to. That's not okay.
jeroboam
27m ago
Yeah, the Romans were pretty misogynistic, but where did all the "protect women" stuff come from if not evolution?
MartianNight
27m ago
They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy
Bizarre and patently false claim.
All evidence suggests trans-identified males have the same level of criminality as other males, i.e., much higher than females and much higher than 3 year old boys (the main source is a paper by Dhejne et al, though generally gender activists taboo this kind of research for showing undesirable results).
And besides, over 90% of trans-identified males opt to keep their penis and testicles. So unlike their female counterparts, trans males are almost always physically intact. They are very much capable of raping women and have done so on many occasions.
mrvanillasky
29m ago
1mg is a good dose, you cannot come off it ever btw, once you start. You can also use dutasteride if fin isnt good enough. I don't know the dosage for that though.
mrvanillasky
30m ago
oh yeah, good point lol. fixed it
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
33m ago
Undoubtedly so! Although the point is that I'm less of an outlier when compared with the transsexual population, as they're more likely than average to be hypersexual and have a wide range of paraphilias.
Lizzardspawn
35m ago
Did it hit?
ToZanarkand
Some day the dream will end
38m ago
I feel like the entire rest of society, particularly the woke end has decided that the rape of women is a small price to pay for feeling progressive about letting transgender women into women’s spaces — without vetting at all.
I think what's more accurate is that they've convinced themselves that it simply "doesn't happen", or that "no one transitions just so they can use women's bathrooms".
SteveKirk
38m ago
Can you confirm she's actually moving? That's the first suspicion I'd have.
Stellula
38m ago
Look I'm not trying to get into an argument about some guy's fake tits here, and I don't really care to keep googling photos of it. If you think that estrogen makes somebody look like that then I guess we just disagree.
... weirdly ... this seems relevant for your point.
Why would this seem "weirdly" relevant to my point?
dovetailing
40m ago
I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.
Oh definitely. The first trans friend I had, I did not clock him, but that’s only because I assumed he was just a very unfortunate-looking and unfortunate-sounding woman. This was when trans was starting to get public attention but before it was everywhere; if I’d known then what I know now, I think my “trans alarm” would have gone off, but I agree that there are some women out there (“stone butch” lesbians, people with medical situations) who also risk setting off “trans alarms”.
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