All else equal the left has compassion for everyone.I don't think the left has compassion for Blair White.
I'm not going to look up who this is, but what I meant to say is that all else equal the left obviously has compassion for trans people.
Female is a sex term usually, so I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. As for "someone identifies as a man but wants to be a woman" - I don't know what that means.QuoteMy conception of a trans person is just "a person whose gender assigned at birth does not match the gender they perceive themselves to be". Whether this comes with dysphoria is not integral.
What if someone is born female, identifies as female, but wants to be male and starts transitioning -- but continues to perceive themselves as female a lot of the time (and hence continues to suffer). Is this person not trans?
Well, you're not so much born trans as assigned a gender at birth that may or may not match your gender preference.How does this work if gender is just a social thing? Doesn't that contradict the idea that you're born trans?No; I think trans people are also only accepted if other people think they are born trans.it is also true that people can claim to be black, and this will get accepted
Only if other people think they're born black! It's not at all accepted for people to transition into another ethnicity or race, that's the point; do you disagree with this?
And no one born white can actually identify as black?
Yet the left obviously has compassion for anyone claiming to be trans.I don't think the left has compassion for Blair White.
No; I think trans people are also only accepted if other people think they are born trans.it is also true that people can claim to be black, and this will get accepted
Only if other people think they're born black! It's not at all accepted for people to transition into another ethnicity or race, that's the point; do you disagree with this?
I still don't understand how the "left goes further left -> country goes further left" causal mechanism is supposed to work, like at all. The way I think it works is that social media (and even mainstream media to an extent) picks out the most extreme things on the other side and people define themselves in opposition to that. The more extreme the left, the more ammunition for the right and vice versa. I think there's lots of evidence that this happens. So the causal mechanisms I see is "left goes further left -> median goes further right" and "right goes further right -> median goes further left". (Feel free to respond to this or not.)I decided to respond to this separately because it's really a different topic.
@First two paragraphs: Ok so this was clearly communicated poorly. My point was thatI fail to see how Jordan Petersen is evidence for (1). I don't know what the incentive is.
(1) there is an incentive for people claiming to be trans, and
(2) there is not much of a downside for doing so, therefore
(3) there will be people who aren't serious claiming to be trans
I brought up Jordan Peterson only as evidence for (1).
So transphobic people made a terrible argument, but the all-inclusive philosophy retroactively makes the argument non-terrible for a different context. That was the point, which confess sounds much more complicated in writing than in my head.Except the argument remains terrible. A man can just go into a woman's bathroom without claiming to be trans, you know? It's not like there is someone at the entrance who checks your ID. Then if they are called out, they can say they made a mistake instead of saying they're trans. This whole bathroom thing is so silly.
I meant "can" in the sense of "if they decide to claim to be trans, they'll get accepted. And in that sense, you are absolutely saying that (or if not I don't understand the position).Well yes, this is true. You made a comparison to race, and it is also true that people can claim to be black, and this will get accepted, because there are white people that can pass as black and vice versa. Noone is doing a race purity check.
At the same time the culture alienates white cis men
if these spaces are inevitably dominated by people who don't actually have gender dysphoria [...] then you've destroyed the [...] communityYou seem to be at the same time arguing that "these spaces" (whatever that means) are too exclusive and not exclusive enough. So which is it?
Yet you also give anyone of these men the opportunity to get all this attention and social status, and you remove all the barriers that made this costly. The argument against worries that men will claim to be trans to do weird shit has always been that no one would go through the process just for that, and that's true, but it stops being true if you remove all barriers for entry.So, I'm confused about a number of things here. The first sentence: Are you still talking about the like of Jordan Petersen (which was what the last sentence was about), or are you talking about men who claim to be trans (which seems to me like it makes more sense contextually, but less sense grammatically)?
And if these spaces are inevitably dominated by people who don't actually have gender dysphoria (I'm saying if but afaik this has already more than happened)And this is definitely the point where I go: "And where is the evidence for that?"
Do you not see how softening the trans label and removing all barriers of entry makes the entire thing that much less credible?No. Some women get operations to reduce their cup size because it is medically indicated; they have chronic back pain otherwise. Other women do it for cosmetic reasons, or because they don't like how society treats them if the have big breasts. Does anyone argue that the latter makes the former less credible?
I continue to think that fighting the political extremes on your side is one of the most important things to do to win electionsCome on, you cannot expect to win any ground with that argument with me. I am the political extreme. The problem is, and continues to be, that the right does not fight their political extreme, and they are decently successful with that strategy. If the left was to fight their political extreme, the result would just be that political discourse shifhts further and further right as the right opens the Overton window to that side and the left continues to shut it down on the other side. And look at the political landscape - this is exactly what is happening.
And it also just muddies the waters. You're lumping two completely different things under the same label; this is just bad instrumental rationality and bound to lead to problems like people following the wrong advice.You claim this, but I don't think I do. My conception of a trans person is just "a person whose gender assigned at birth does not match the gender they perceive themselves to be". Whether this comes with dysphoria is not integral.
But faust literally likened it to someone getting a haircut. If the positive stakes are that low, then yeah, it seems to me that allowing everyone into the fold is a huge net negative.This just seems like bad faith to me. My haircut comparison obviously wasn't meant to say that transitioning is on the same level in terms of stakes, I just wanted to know why you think there is a categorical difference between the two. To be fair, Awaclus made this point better. Unfortunately you did not respond.
And also if we are going to say that everyone can be trans, why don't we do the same for race?I am not saying that "everyone can be trans". Please don't strawman my position.
Ok, but is it possible that there are many of them, lots of them watch destiny's stream because they feel like they don't belong anywhere else (obviously not in right wing spaces, and also not in trans spaces), and hundreds of them write to him describing how they feel, and that's how he has these beliefs, i.e., out of compassion rather than transphobia?It's possible. You will notice that I did not call Destiny transphobic. But even if he has these beliefs out of compassion, that doesn't make them good views. Destiny mentioned Contrapoints, so I know that at least on some level he has engaged with different points of view and rejected them, so this is not a question of ignorance.
Like why is it not definitionally the case that people who transition without dysphoria have no good reason to transition?IDK, if I go to the hairdresser despite having no hair dysphoria, do I have no good reason to go to the hairdresser?
I think that in an ideal future, fewer people would experience gender dysphoria because the concept of gender would be erased.Most gay people in the 50s would probably have pressed a button to make themselves not-gay, so was being gay a sickness in the 50s?
Do you think that in the future, if trans rights improve as much as gay rights have improved since the 50s until now, people with gender dysphoria would not press a button to make themselves not dysphoric?
Citation needed! I mean sure it's a theoretical spectrum, as in, you can find at least one person who has a small desire to change their gender. The question is whether the graph looks like this or like thisSeems to me like assuming a normal distribution is a good default, and anything that goes against it is what I'd like to see evidence for.
I can say with certainty that this isn't true; I responded to this point because that's the only point you provided a time stamp for.Well this is demonstrably false; your first response predates my giving a timestamp.
Do you think it's possible that a lot of people with gender dysphoria think (a) and (b)?I mean, for some values of "a lot". If you put them all in one place, it would probably be a big crowd. Lots of people with gender dysphoria are also cis, and these ideas are pretty mainstream in such circles, but that is I imagine not what you mean.
If a gay person could press a button and make themselves not-gay, I think most of them wouldn't do that. Certainly I don't think bisexual women would press that button to like men only. But if a person with gender dysphoria could press the button to get rid of their dysphoria, they probably would. So these two things are different in one very important property, which is whether the thing is bad.Again, I say "trans", and you substitute "gender dysphoric", as if these are the same thing. Most gay people in the 50s would probably have pressed a button to make themselves not-gay, so was being gay a sickness in the 50s?
I mean, it's a perspective thing to some extent. But illness always carries this notion of "something is wrong here" and that it should be treated to go away. Even in a world where mental illness is not stigmatized I think it's still bad to say "being gay is being sick" or "neurodivergent people are diseased", and the same holds for trans people.the assumption that being trans is the same as experiencing gender dyphoria, which seems dangerously close to labeling transness as a mental illness.
Isn't the reason why this is dangerous not that it's false, but that it's easier to convince people that a particular thing we don't want them to stigmatize isn't a mental illness than it is to convince them to stop stigmatizing mental illnesses?
Because otherwise what he's saying doesn't make any sense. It's clearly the case that using the preferred gender for someone who doesn't pass is a gesture of nice-ity, it can't be anything else. And the example he gives right afterward is also about that; it's about what trans people want, not what others are doing.I agree that what he's saying doesn't make sense. I don't really see this other way of interpreting things. If someone thinks a) some trans people are "fake", b) self-ID isn't a valid way to determine who is what gender, and c) pronouns shouldn't be just used out of respect, then I fail to see how one could reach another conclusion.
The unspoken thing here is that I feel like you're doing this purity test thing where you're taking someone who's arguably done a ton for trans rights but is in fact center left rather than radically left on the isssue, and then you're looking for the one thing in the video that sounds worst, and you're using it to villify him even though the interpretation isn't even plausible. Like I said I grant you that it's plausible on first listen, but really only on first listen.I have, in fact, not looked for one thing. If you look at my original response, you will see that I mentioned multiple things, and I feel like those pretty much cover the entirety of the conversation. (I did not talk much about this whole thing about "should trans people try to pass", but that was mostly taftaj talking and I didn't have any particular issue there.)
Well I made no statement about the extent. But phrases like "fake trans people" or the rejection of pronouns are clear virtue signals towards transphobes to me.Like it's actually two intelligent people talking about the issue rather than virtue signaling.Also I feel like we had this discussion before, but of course anyone who discusses stuff on a public platform virtue signals. Destiny and taftaj just signal different virtues than people who are more pro-trans.
Oh no, you cannot sell this kind of signal relativism to the most signal sensitive person on earth. It is absolutely not the case that everyone signals equally, or that the degree to which people signal (virtue or otherwise) depends only on the size of their platform. You can have a small platform and operate entirely on signaling, or a large platform and be entire genuine. (I don't recall this having come up before.) I didn't detect any signaling in this conversation.
Well around 35:30 taftaj says "when you use a pronoun [...] you respect that person's agency" and Destiny reacts with "I reject that". For me that signals pretty clearly that Destiny doesn't think that there is a reason to respect pronouns.and says we shouldn't respect pronouns.
Destiny did not say that we should disrespect pronouns, he said that the culture of having pronouns was a mistake because it prevents the feedback signal to trans people. That's unrelated to the question of whether we should respect pronouns if people do request them.
Like it's actually two intelligent people talking about the issue rather than virtue signaling.Also I feel like we had this discussion before, but of course anyone who discusses stuff on a public platform virtue signals. Destiny and taftaj just signal different virtues than people who are more pro-trans.
Destiny talks with a trans person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW9sC56x8IU
It's interesting because the trans person is less pro trans than destiny in this discussion, and also because she talks about most trans women not passing while she totally passes. Best discussion on trans stuff I've seen, not that this bar is very high.
Exclave - $5
Victory
Worth 2 VP per card on your Exclave mat that another player has more copies of than you.
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When you gain this, gain an Action or Treasure onto your Exclave mat.
In the most unexpected of crossovers, Daniel Dennett was interviewed by David Pakman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcSYK9VTqmQI watched it so you don't have to!
I am not watching this. Fuck Dennett.
