domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
dovetailing
17m ago
I do not think that describing trans women as 'men with a cross dressing fetish' is very close to reality.
There is a small fraction of people who are genuinely very uncomfortable with their biological gender. They sometimes take hormones, get surgery and go through byzantine legal processes to change their legal gender. They kill themselves at elevated rates when forced to conform to their biological gender. This is not just some kink.
I've been arguing for something similar elsewhere in the thread so it's only fair that I push back gently on this too.
First, pedantic point, you mean "biological sex". The people who get suicidal are uncomfortable with their bodies. That aside:
A large fraction of MtFs have autogynephilia. Even before the recent (20 yrs) runup, it was most likely more than half; now, it's probably more like 90%. This is even when you include only the people who get some form of medical transition; if you include all the "dude shaves his legs and wears a skirt" crowd it's probably even higher (though at that point you probably just start getting general weirdos who aren't in the same clade as people who seek medical transition).
Do the AGP MtFs who seek medical transition and official name changes fit your description? Maybe! Depending on exactly how you cash out terms like "dysphoria" (or your "very uncomfortable"), possibly the vast majority of them! But also.... AGP has a sexual element. Almost nobody medically transitions because it gets them off to do so, that's completely crazy (and sometimes they get surgeries to remove their genitals or reconstruct them as pseudo-female-genitals, come on; and sometimes they find that cross-sex hormones prevent them from getting off and still continue to transition). But at the same time... if you've got AGP, then you do have an arousal response to the idea of being female, and for many AGPs, this is especially triggered by cross-dressing. So there's a sense in which a lot of MtFs... do, in fact, have a cross-dressing fetish, if you look at it that way. It's not why they're transitioning, in the sense that they wouldn't be doing it if it was just a fetish, but it's there. I've heard it becomes less... stimulating... once they've been doing it for a long time, though. It's complicated.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
28m ago
Are you trying to find the path to some sort of optimal equanamity or state of elation? I just want to make sure I understand the root interest.
the most pleasant sensation a human can experience […] can be sustained for hours […] and demand very little energy. These show up on brain scans.
I don’t think this is the case as described. I can believe that there is a euphoric experience that is obtained through meditation, and I’ve experienced something like that approximately twice, so maybe brain scans show a meditative euphoria. But claiming that the euphoric experience can be had without a “come down” period is the psychological equivalent of belief in a perpetual motion machine. Euphoria is the experience of an unusual amount of pleasure, and an experience which provides euphoria will eventually provide “mere pleasantness” when repeated. And if repeated long enough it will provide “mere baseline”. The experience of euphoria is relative to the experience of non-euphoria, so even without getting into neuroscience, how is it possible to continually experience euphoria without experiencing something less-preferred to relate it to?
Let’s suppose you could self-administer euphoria on command. This would be similar to heroin addiction. What would be your incentive to fulfill the hours of necessary daily tasks to maintain health, if you could summon euphoria at will? Once you exit that state of euphoria you would feel abysmal because now your body has to utilize so much energy and effort to, like, get groceries while in a state of displeasure. It’s questionable whether you would even continue to participate in society, as socializing is a requirement for the pursuit of contingent rewards which you apparently can summon in your mind whenever you want.
I don’t think you are treating these eastern spiritual claims with enough skepticism. The idea that a human can experience an eternally preferable state (a bliss) without the experience of a negative emotional state to refer back to is illogical. The idea that we can train our brain to treat endogenous opiate release differently is unfounded. And finally, the idea that this would be preferable to how we are designed is unevidenced. Re the last point: let’s say a new form of fentanyl was invented that lacked any come down. You could take it forever and experience bliss forever. (Suspend belief in neuroscience). Well, if you decide to enter into this bliss, you will immediately lack any interest in: basis human activity like walking and eating, learning any new information, socializing, morality. You would be in a permanent vegetative state. Is this actually preferable, even if it is bliss? Clearly no. There’s some higher order part of ourself that finds this repulsive and actually demands the necessity of pain in order to adapt to biological, external, and social reality.
If it’s the case that humans habituate to pleasures and pains and can never maintain a steady supply of pleasure, and that we have a higher “moral pleasure” which justifies (and requires) the existence of pain and painful experience in order to maximize our cognitive and physical adaption to physical reality, then the greatest path to an optimal emotional state isn’t meditative practices or stoic practices but a philosophy that promotes the most adaption (pleasure, pain and all).. That is, a philosophy that doesn’t try to maximize pleasure or reduce pain, but instead tries to maximize the things which we intuitively find right regardless of pleasure and pain. Even though pleasure cannot actually be pursued in such a way that we obtain it indefinitely, and all shortcuts fail, humans seem to be designed to find certain things right and preferable regardless of pleasure and pain (participating in reality is “more right” than seeing someone in an opium den, even if opium lacked a come-down in an imagined world; experiencing pain for loved ones is “right” despite its obvious pain; beautiful nature is “right”; a purposeful but painful life is “more right” than pleasure; etc).
Okay, so which moral system promotes “acknowledging we must experience pain in order to pursue a higher feeling of rightness which is pleasure-ambivalent, because that’s actually greater than the pursuit of pleasure”? My vote is Christianity right now, as the central figure is someone being tortured and dying for his purpose despite feeling forsaken. That’s a handy way to at least remember our underlying moral principle. Maybe there are some other ones.
jimm
32m ago
Therapy is inherently opinionated.
Where are you getting this idea? It's certainly not true.
jimm
44m ago
Therapy doesn't require accepting anything on authority. It's not particularly hard to tear people down by their own judgement without asserting any of your own, just by pointing at the things they try to look away from. There's no reason a LLM couldn't be trained to do that.
dovetailing
45m ago
Why do you suppose suddenly they are a major front in the culture war?
You're not wrong, but I think it's several reasons:
- As you mention, that community has defended and/or denied the existence of obvious bad actors, especially sex pests who either are or claim to be trans (there's high profile examples of both).
- There's been an enormous growth (like, orders of magnitude) in the number of people transitioning medically (as in cross-sex hormones and/or surgeries) and an even bigger growth in the number of people self-identifying as "trans" in the last ~15-20 years, which has resulted in:
- A lot more "visibly trans" people, who a lot of people find disturbing (especially MtFs),
- The demands made by the movement getting louder and applying more frequently.
- A lot of "holy crap what is happening" reaction as people's family members get (apparently suddenly) sucked in to the movement and often start doing things like changing their names, insisting on being referred to as the opposite sex, even things like taking cross-sex hormones and getting irreversible surgeries.
Even without the bad actors issue, I think this would be a major CW front. Maybe bathrooms specifically wouldn't be as big of a flash point, but there was always going to be something.
jimm
57m ago
"Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes.
My completely male cousin had a drivers license that identified him as female due to pure governmental incompetence. I think even the most extreme trans advocates would agree that this ought not give him a pass to use the women's bathroom.
Passing the buck to the government only passes the buck. The question is over what exactly makes one a "woman" in the sense of deserving bathroom privileges, and the answer is not "the infallible government said so".
rmtodd
58m ago
They didn't talk in terms of "users customizing the algorithm" back then, but Usenet certainly supported user/client controlled presentation order/selection of articles since even before the development of the Usenet network protocol NNTP in RFC 977 in 1986. Usenet clients/servers had this as working technology even before there was a world-wide-web (HTTP didn't start till 1989 or so).
dovetailing
1hr ago
AIUI this is pretty much the "tucute" vs "truscum" (what is wrong with people and these juvenile names?) debate, which the "tucute" side won in the mainstream (how on earth did we get to the point that any of this is mainstream?) trans movement.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1hr ago
dovetailing
1hr ago
this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
doglatine
1hr ago
I find a healthy bunch of Substacks scratches the same itch as social media while being less corrosive to the mind and soul.
07mk
1hr ago
To me, an MtF "woman" lacks a penis and testicles. Does the calculus change if that is what "trans" means?
That's been considered transphobic in the mainstream identity politics crowd for probably close to a decade now. The only thing that is indicated by someone being "trans" is that they identify as the other sex because they feel like the other sex. No change in presentation is required to be considered a transwoman or transman, so certainly no requirements for hormones or surgery either.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1hr ago
If the trans community were smart, they'd stop complaining about these bills and shrug them off.
Agreed, but that's kind of the problem here - the trans community has not been smart, and instead doubles down defending bad actors (or denying they exist).
Had trans women limited themselves to peeing in peace, you might have had an occasional Karen freaking out seeing someone who looks like a man in the women's restroom, but most people wouldn't have cared. My recollection is that this wasn't an issue for many years. Trans women have been around since long before the current iteration of the culture wars. Why do you suppose suddenly they are a major front in the culture war? I don't think it's because conservatives suddenly discovered they exist.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
1hr ago
I like these conversations a lot more when the Israeli side is willing to admit that they're a blood-drenched, bronze-age state intent on ethnic purity and conquest via force of arms to reclaim the territory their god said was theirs - when you're willing to admit that there are actual conversations that can be had.
I too like conversations a lot more when my opponents are willing to accept my most uncharitable and cartoonish representation of their point of view as accurate. It's so bizarre you would suggest the Israeli side should just admit that they are evil and monstrous and start the conversation from there that I am genuinely not sure whether I missed the subtle irony you're conveying.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
The point is Chesterton's Fence.
You know nothing about medicine or the risks and benefits of what you are proposing. Medicine is not auto repair.
That's kind of important.
urquan
1hr ago
Mastodon is also used by people who believe you can create technological solutions to social problems, and people who believe "decentralization" means "has the ability to cultivate an echo chamber of exact proportions." With a helping of "why would anyone ever want to delete a post from the internet?"
I suppose if Mastodon had come into existence in the 90s, it would have been used by libertarians a la crypto. But of course we had decentralized social media in the 90s, they were just called IMs and message boards.
The internet is the real decentralized social media, we don't need fancy algorithms or federation protocols: we have the protocols at home, and they're called the Internet Protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
I still don't understand why such an absurdly-overengineered technological solution has been adopted by such censorious people. The ethos of software engineers has changed so much in the last 20 years.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
If you can't answer the analog of those questions for an item of auto repair, does that mean we have reason to ban people from doing it?
My read is that all of those things are directly in the vein of "they can hurt themselves" and "there is still possible value in expertise", not externalities. It's telling that you started with the one example of a clear externality, and as soon as we took that off the table, you completely abandoned the externality argument. Or should I pull a you and say, "If you want to continue this conversation please explain what testosterone stewardship and why it's important, or argue why it isn't." Because if that's not a thing, you're jumping to an entirely different class of argument and not even bothering to acknowledge it.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Do patients ask for these? What's the ratio of people who actually need them versus just think they need them? Are their side effects? Are they bad? Are the risks something that someone can easily understand and make informed decisions based off of? Are patients willing to try safer and more effective interventions first?
What's the evidence base and recommendations, how sure are we about them? Are their bad actors involved who are incentivizing certain behaviors? What is the level of excess supplementation that production can carry?
How many of these questions can you answer?
aqouta
2hr ago
Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become
It's very easy to make your X feed not like this. block or mute a dozen or so accounts and the algorithm mostly takes care of you. You get more of what you interact with so if you're arguing with right wingers you'll see more right wingers. Every time I look at the profile of someone who complains about this sort of thing I always find pages and pages of arguments with the people they're complaining about also that they're following tons of people with pages and pages of arguments with the people they're talking about. It's so obvious to see too, go on X and reply to one of the China shill accounts, you will very quickly start seeing tons of them. I'm convinced most of the calls of people who think X has changed since Musk took over are really just seeing that the algorithm is no longer suppressing right wing accounts that they were used to "dunking" on and are getting the adjustments that were normal to suck you into any other group on X.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
If NATO directly entered the war with large numbers of its own combat forces, it would defeat Russia's military and drive it out of Ukraine. Russia's only way of stopping NATO from doing that is to make NATO think that if driven far enough into a corner, Russia might actually escalate to using nuclear weapons.
I think you underestimate the reluctance of NATO to become directly involved in a war with Russia, which would easily spill outside of Ukraine.
The logic of the cold war was to prevent any direct conflict between two blocks. If the US gets involved in Vietnam, then the USSR does not ship their troops there to directly fire on US soldiers. Instead, it provides weapons to the Vietcong. Likewise, if the USSR invades Afghanistan, the US will simply provide weapons to their local opponents (Bin Laden and the Taliban, as it turned out) to fight the USSR.
This logic is still very much in play even today. NATO is totally playing by these rules, we arm the Ukraine (with non-nuclear weapons) and let them fight and die for their country as long as they wish to.
Quite frankly, Ukraine is not worth a direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Even if the conflict was initially restricted to Ukrainian soil, these things have a tendency to escalate. Say air defense stationed in Poland becomes involved, then Russia bombs it, then Poland declares that an attack on their soil and invokes article five.
cartman
2hr ago
I don't understand at all what you're trying to convey with this comment other than the first part.
jkf
2hr ago
communal showers i’m pretty sure went out of style due to increasing wealth making individual stalls more affordable.
Don't think so Tim -- at my high school the girls changeroom had separate stalls, while the boys' was prison-style. (but with nicer tile-work)
Fairly sure it wouldn't have killed the school budget to build the male changeroom to the same specs -- this is just what locker rooms were supposed to be like. (for bonding or something? IDK)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
2hr ago
... because the other side called him a doge before they had a cause; if he is a doge, beware his fanges. (wow. very revenge plot. which caskete choose? argument much clever.)
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
2hr ago
I wonder how many of them ever un-ironically used that line about those accustomed to privilege perceiving equality as oppression....
I'm not going to deny that such people exist --- there's apparently a fetish for everything --- but I've never seen evidence that this is an appreciable fraction of the population in question. Do you have any?
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