domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
dovetailing
2m 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
14m 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
14m 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
26m 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.**
34m ago
dovetailing
37m 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
39m 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
44m 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
58m 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr ago
I don't understand at all what you're trying to convey with this comment other than the first part.
jkf
1hr 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.**
1hr 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.**
1hr ago
I wonder how many of them ever un-ironically used that line about those accustomed to privilege perceiving equality as oppression....
jkf
1hr ago
It certainly dropped an impressive array of fireworks, with no apparent defensive response...
chooky
1hr ago
This is getting at one of my questions for the OP - what exactly is meant by "biological" and "trans"?
To me, an MtF "woman" lacks a penis and testicles. Does the calculus change if that is what "trans" means? In general, I am pretty much of the opinion that this is not an area in which the government should get involved, thougb I am grateful for an effect of previous bathroom controversies being that most restaurants and bars changed to genderless bathrooms, making it more likely that there won't be a line. However, lacking a penis seems like a reasonable standard for someone being allowed entry into the women's bathroom regardless of sex at birth.
Rov_Scam
1hr ago
But, we're starting to see fans catch on: the league achieves parity over time by making it impossible to keep a great team together. Instead teams go all in for a championship run, then rebuild. The result is more teams than ever aren't even really trying to be good at football, and fans tune out.
It's still better than the alternative, though. In 35 years as a Pirates fan I've experienced exactly 6 playoff appearances (1990–1992, 2013–2015), one winning season where they didn't make the playoffs (2018), and a handful more that were worth paying attention to at some point (1997, 2003 (April only), 2005 (Early June only), 2011, 2012, 2016, 2023, 2024). The rest were all over before they even started. Yet I watched anyway, hoping something would happen, hoping they'd turn the corner. Prior to their 2013 playoff appearance I made a list of all the little things we'd suffered through as Pirates fans over the course of 20 losing seasons. I put together an all-time 20 years of losing commemorative team, full of players who personified 20 years of losing. I'm accused of my family of either being insincere or an idiot for continuing to pay attention. Mostly, though, no one cares. The Pirates continue to exist primarily as an inexpensive pro-sports option for families. Kids watch until they are old enough to understand that the team sucks and isn't worth watching.
Winning does not rectify this. Every time the team appears to be having a decent season, there's a loud chorus warning that the success is ephemeral; don't get used to it. During their string of winning seasons in 2013–2015, people still said that the best we could hope for was a few winning seasons per decade. Even if the team won the World Series, all we'd hear about is that it's a fluke, like the Marlins, and that Nutting would soon sell off the team, like the Marlins. Granted, Bob Nutting is part of the problem, but if the league were actually concerned about parity and had a structure akin to the NFL, there would at least be some incentive for him to try to have a winning team.
The thing about NFL rebuilds is that they're at least short enough that they're fun to watch in real time. Granted, as a Steelers fan my team will never rebuild (or at least never admit to it), but there was always a reason to watch. Will Mitch Trubisky perform better than geriatric Ben? Is Kenny Pickett the answer? How will Russ and Justin do? Will the defense be enough to compensate for an anemic offense? Elsewhere, no one expected the Commanders to turn it around as quickly as they did. No one expected the Bengals to do the same a few years earlier. The Patriots suck, but there's reason for optimism. I'd much rather have this than a league where every decade there are like 5 good teams, a few teams that will occasionally make the playoffs, and a hige raft of incompetents.
Look at the NFL in the '70s. The Steelers, Dolphins, Raiders, Cowboys, Vikings, Rams, and maybe Redskins were good. Then you had teams like the Colts, Broncos, Browns, and Oilers that were kind of good, sometimes. Then you had everyone else, who largely spent the decade in obscurity. the New York Giants did not make a single playoff appearance between 1964 and 1980. The Jets didn't make one between 1970 and 1980. The Patriots made 6 total playoff appearances (AFL included) between their inception in 1960 and the introduction of the salary cap in 1994. As I mentioned in my post below, the Steelers made the playoffs once in their first 40 years in the league.
A better example may be the NHL during the Dead Puck Era. You had New Jersey, Detroit, Colorado, Dallas, and maybe Philadelphia as legitimate cup contenders. The Sabres almost wone won but that was due to Hasek more than anything else. Even teams like the Penguins who consistently made the playoffs were never expected to do much. Look at the rosters and those teams were stacked. The other playoff regulars had a few stars but got thin quickly, and a bunch of teams had nobody. This is a big reason why Gary Bettman takes so much heat over expansion; everyone points to how long it took to get hockey going in the new markets, but most of the time those markets had very little to root for.
quiet_NaN
2hr 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.
Different cultures have dealt differently with non-conformists of all sorts. Killing them at the earliest opportunity is certainly a popular choice.
Modern liberal democracies generally frown on that and try to do better than just applying whatever solution would suit the majority of people. We don't accept "most straight men would prefer if they knew for certain that the man peeing next to them was not sexually attracted to them" as an excuse to kill all the gays and bisexuals, or even kick them out of the military.
The bathroom issue is simply an issue of trade-offs. Having to use a gendered bathroom which belongs to a gender one does not identify as clearly can be humiliating. Imagine getting told that you are too small or weak to qualify for the men's bathroom, or that you are too large, ugly or flat-chested to qualify for the women's bathroom.
On the other hand, there is both a perception of danger if people who are not cis-women are allowed in women's bathroom as well as possibly some actual danger.
I think that the actual danger is over-rated. With the possible exception of Hogwarts, gender restrictions in bathrooms are not strictly enforced. Someone who is entering a women's bathroom to commit rape is unlikely to care that he will also break some trivial statute about not going to the women's bathroom. Nor would punishing someone who disregards the gender sign on a bathroom (for example, to avoid waiting time) with a lengthy prison sentence be proportionate.
There will probably be some sick fucks who like to jerk off in the women's bathroom who can use the excuse 'but you see, I actually identify as a woman' if they are seen entering or exiting, but this is a lesser concern.
At the end of the day, it is a numbers game. If half of the rapes are committed by men in women's bathrooms who had previously invoked their gender identity as an excuse to be there, then I would agree that this was a huge fucking problem and we should restrict access to improve women's safety.
As things stand, I don't think it is a huge practical issue. At the risk of sounding like some woke, I think most women I know would very much prefer having to share their bathrooms with trans women to losing access to abortions.
A decade ago, Scott argued for drawing a more complex gender boundary than 'has Y-chromosome' as a cheap and easy way to improve outcomes for a lot of people. I think that his article is still spot on.
I think that the bathroom safety argument frequently is used by anti-trans people not because preventing rapes is their first and foremost concern, but because it is one of the few issues with trans rights that the average person will care about.
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.
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