Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[faust]

Yet the left obviously has compassion for anyone claiming to be trans.

I don't think the left has compassion for Blair White.

[Awaclus]

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 do! People (immigrants specifically) transition to new ethnicities all the time and the only people that aren't fine with it are the ethnonationalists and the adjacent conservatives. Typically it's only a cultural transitioning process without any body modifications and doesn't involve completely abandoning your previous ethnicity, so it is a little different from stereotypical gender transitioning, but it's transitioning nonetheless. Elon Musk wasn't born a white American, but everyone accepts him as a white American now.

[Awaclus]

Yet the left obviously has compassion for anyone claiming to be trans.

I don't think the left has compassion for Blair White.

Or Chris Chan.

[silverspawn]

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.

[silverspawn]

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?

No; I think trans people are also only accepted if other people think they are born trans.

How does this work if gender is just a social thing? Doesn't that contradict the idea that you're born trans?

And no one born white can actually identify as black?

[silverspawn]

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.

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?

[faust]

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?

No; I think trans people are also only accepted if other people think they are born trans.

How does this work if gender is just a social thing? Doesn't that contradict the idea that you're born trans?

And no one born white can actually identify as black?

Well, you're not so much born trans as assigned a gender at birth that may or may not match your gender preference.

I'm not super deep into the topic of race, so I don't really want to discuss it further.

[faust]

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.

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?

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.

[faust]

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.

All else equal the left has compassion for everyone.

[silverspawn]

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.

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?

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.

Well, you ask the person "do you think you're a man or a woman" and they say "a woman". You clarify, "do you mean you feel like you're perceived as that socially, or do you feel like you are that", and they say "I feel like I am that". Then you ask "do you like being a woman" and they respond "no I hate it, I constantly suffer because I feel uncomfortable being a woman, I would like to be a man more than anything".

And we can additionally stipulate that they already took steps to transition.

According to your definition, this person is not trans. I think that's grossly wrong.

[silverspawn]

All else equal the left has compassion for everyone.

Clearly a lot of people don't think so. Even if every single one of the five quintillion Jordan Peterson fans were wrong about being rejected by the left, there would still be an incentive to present yourself as transgender rather than cis male.

[silverspawn]

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 do! People (immigrants specifically) transition to new ethnicities all the time and the only people that aren't fine with it are the ethnonationalists and the adjacent conservatives. Typically it's only a cultural transitioning process without any body modifications and doesn't involve completely abandoning your previous ethnicity, so it is a little different from stereotypical gender transitioning, but it's transitioning nonetheless. Elon Musk wasn't born a white American, but everyone accepts him as a white American now.

That doesn't surprise me. I would guess that you also feel compassionate toward Elizabeth Hoover, if you've heard about her, which you probably did since you read the news. But the left almost universally rejects cases like hers, which to me looks like a mount Everest-sized hole in the entire ideology. The only reason I see to claim that trans people should be accepted but Elizabeth should be shunned for claiming to be Native American is that gender dysphoria is a thing and race dysphoria is not. If you take that away, then she has a way stronger case for being a Native American than just about any trans person has for being the opposite gender.

(And framing it as "she's guilty because she lied" is a pure cop out since she obviously lied because she knew she wouldn't be accepted, and she hasn't been accepted.) How could anyone think this and still take trans people without dysphoria seriously?

[faust]

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.

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?

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.

Well, you ask the person "do you think you're a man or a woman" and they say "a woman". You clarify, "do you mean you feel like you're perceived as that socially, or do you feel like you are that", and they say "I feel like I am that". Then you ask "do you like being a woman" and they respond "no I hate it, I constantly suffer because I feel uncomfortable being a woman, I would like to be a man more than anything".

And we can additionally stipulate that they already took steps to transition.

According to your definition, this person is not trans. I think that's grossly wrong.

I can't tell if you're just nitpicking at phrasing or if there is some broader point here.

The imagined dialogue could come from a cis woman who thinks her position in society sucks because of patriarchy. I'm sure you can find lots of women in Afghanistan who will tell you that they would rather be a man. They will not all be trans.

Conversely, it could also be dialogue coming from a trans man that uses language in a way different from me. I don't know just based on what you posted.

[faust]

Anyways I think I'm done talking about hypothetical trans people without dysphoria that have not been shown to exist in real life.

[Awaclus]

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.

That's not my argument though. My argument is that if you want to stop people from transitioning to another gender just to gain access to privileges, the obvious solution is for everyone collectively to stop giving people privileges on the basis of gender, and as long as gendered privileges exist, it's FUCKING GREAT! for everyone to transition into whatever gender gives them the privileges they value the most in principle (besides the obvious downside that you'll probably give yourself gender dysphoria by physically transitioning if you're cis, which is awful).

At the same time, you have this political fight where conservative people think this entire thing is crazy, and supposedly the argument is that there is a really awful thing happening here with depression and suicide rates through the roof, and this intervention is one of the only things that has a proven track record of helping at least some. Do you not see how softening the trans label and removing all barriers of entry makes the entire thing that much less credible? I think I brought up this type of argument before and didn't get any daylight at least with faust, but I continue to think that fighting the political extremes on your side is one of the most important things to do to win elections, and conversely, making the extremes more extreme is one of the most damaging things.

I think this is multiple separate issues.

Firstly, although we might for pragmatic purposes want to use certain arguments to most effectively convince people or to advocate for certain configurations of society to most effectively push society in the direction we want it to go, we should not confuse those arguments for the most correct beliefs nor should we confuse those configurations for the ideal configurations. It might be the case that the best way to convince conservatives about trans rights is to tell them X, but it does not follow that X is something we should believe ourselves.

As long as we are talking about what should be argued and advocated for:

Most conservative people actually either don't think the entire thing is crazy or aren't particularly bothered by it being crazy even if they think that. They're worried about a few individual aspects of it if you bring it up, but they probably don't even spend a lot of time thinking about those worries otherwise. The depression and suicide rates are not where you want the conversation to go, because conservatives will obviously assume the causality is in the "transitioning causes the suicide rates" direction, so by taking the argument to that territory, you're already making it an uphill battle for yourself and might just end up making the conservatives more convinced than they previously were that this transgender stuff is dangerous and should be disapproved of.

If your goal is to get elected, especially to a low granularity position like the president, then being the most boring centrist possible is great. If your goal is to influence politics, being the most boring centrist possible is useless. To move the Overton window, you need the whole spectrum of views from slightly-to-your-side-from-center to crazy people who support a completely bonkers version of your side that isn't remotely socially acceptable, and various people on that spectrum will need to play their roles appropriately with respect to where on that spectrum they are. Blindly spending a lot of time criticizing the extreme people on your side moves the Overton window in the wrong direction, so you have to be careful about how you do it. For example, The Amazing Atheist now thinks of it as a mistake of some sort that he, as a progressive, played such a major role in establishing the "anti-SJW reaction video" genre on YouTube which he did mostly because it was fun to criticize stupid stuff, and obviously the outcome of that didn't help progressives very much: instead of having conservatives discover these videos and develop more favorable views about progressives as a result, conservatives discovered them and most of those channels became radically more conservative to keep their now conservative viewers happy.

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.

This we agree on (except I seem to think it is a lot less serious than you do).

And for what? That's the thing I come back to. If it was important to do this, then maybe. 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. I feel each one of these three reasons ougweighs the upside by itself.

(When I say don't open the fold I obviously(?) don't mean misgender people; I'm going to use the pronouns anyone tells me to use every time without question. But I don't think / don't yet have been presented with the positive case for why it would be a good idea to encourage people to identify as trans.)

It's a little unclear what you actually mean by "allowing everyone into the fold". If your argument is literally that we shouldn't encourage people to identify as trans, then I agree because I don't think we should be trying to influence people's gender identities in any direction, but it feels like I'm agreeing with a motte rather than your actual position.

[silverspawn]

It's a little unclear what you actually mean by "allowing everyone into the fold". If your argument is literally that we shouldn't encourage people to identify as trans, then I agree because I don't think we should be trying to influence people's gender identities in any direction, but it feels like I'm agreeing with a motte rather than your actual position.

I don't think you should promote the idea that identifying as a certain gender is all you need to be trans. I don't think you should encourage individual people who seem very lukewarm about the idea that they are probably trans and just as trans as someone with cripplying dysphoria. That kind of thing. Don't push the inclusive narrative.

(Your entire comment was great, my brain just feels too mushy right now to properly engage with the more complicated parts, will get to those later.)

[silverspawn]

This we agree on (except I seem to think it is a lot less serious than you do).

Eh, I think that's definitely the weakest point of the three ((1) dysphoric people no longer having a home, (2) the radicalizing effect, (3) the muddying thing), but it's not nothing.

[Awaclus]

That doesn't surprise me. I would guess that you also feel compassionate toward Elizabeth Hoover, if you've heard about her, which you probably did since you read the news. But the left almost universally rejects cases like hers, which to me looks like a mount Everest-sized hole in the entire ideology. The only reason I see to claim that trans people should be accepted but Elizabeth should be shunned for claiming to be Native American is that gender dysphoria is a thing and race dysphoria is not. If you take that away, then she has a way stronger case for being a Native American than just about any trans person has for being the opposite gender.

Eh, I think the blood purity ShiT to gain access to privileges that are meant only for descendants of certain tribes is unacceptable to begin with, and Hoover was apparently happy to benefit from that as long as she thought she was entitled to it, and later when she did acknowledge that it was wrong of her, what she apologized for was not her behavior but literally her genetic ancestry, giving legitimacy to the idea that people should ever have to apologize for that. I do think that she should have been allowed to live her life identifying as Native American since she apparently did have that cultural connection, but on the whole, I feel more contempt than compassion toward her.

[silverspawn]

Most conservative people actually either don't think the entire thing is crazy or aren't particularly bothered by it being crazy even if they think that. They're worried about a few individual aspects of it if you bring it up, but they probably don't even spend a lot of time thinking about those worries otherwise. The depression and suicide rates are not where you want the conversation to go, because conservatives will obviously assume the causality is in the "transitioning causes the suicide rates" direction, so by taking the argument to that territory, you're already making it an uphill battle for yourself and might just end up making the conservatives more convinced than they previously were that this transgender stuff is dangerous and should be disapproved of.

I do agree that trans issues aren't that high up on the list of what the typical conservative worries about. So yeah as far as magnitude goes, other things like the abortion debate play a way bigger role. But other than that, I'm not convinced. (And I also think the small role still far outweighs the benefits of having an inclusive trans label.) Here's a hypothetical discussion I see as plausible to have with a conservative:

Conservative: The whole trans thing is just weird and creepy to me, people are cutting off their genitals and [...]
Me: There's pretty solid evidence that gender dysphoria is a thing, people with dysphoria have crazy elevated depression and suicide rates, and there's zero evidence that trying to cure them out of it works. It's like gay conversion therapy, it's been tried and just doesn't work. But there is solid evidence that transitioning does help. And if that's the only thing that helps these people, shouldn't they be allowed to go through with it?
Conservative (unless they're very radical): Ok in those cases, that's fair enough. But what about {some more radical thing leftist people believe}?
Me: Yeah that's stupid, I don't agree with that either.
Conservative: Oh okay. (is now .1% blue-pilled)

So yeah I don't think that going to suicide rates is a bad idea, and I also haven't been talked about of my main point which is that representing a moderate PoV is generally helpful and representing a radical PoV generally harmful for your side. Not as a politician, but as a random person in the discourse.

The Amazing Atheist now thinks of it as a mistake of some sort that he, as a progressive, played such a major role in establishing the "anti-SJW reaction video" genre on YouTube which he did mostly because it was fun to criticize stupid stuff, and obviously the outcome of that didn't help progressives very much: instead of having conservatives discover these videos and develop more favorable views about progressives as a result, conservatives discovered them and most of those channels became radically more conservative to keep their now conservative viewers happy.

I don't accept this as a counter-example to my thesis because "anti-SJW reaction videos" sound to me like they'll be unproductive because they're intrinsically about making fun of something rather than discussing something. So I don't think the problem there is that they're representing a moderate political view. I think >95% of political mocking is counterproductive.

[silverspawn]

To move the Overton window, you need the whole spectrum of views from slightly-to-your-side-from-center to crazy people who support a completely bonkers version of your side that isn't remotely socially acceptable, and various people on that spectrum will need to play their roles appropriately with respect to where on that spectrum they are. Blindly spending a lot of time criticizing the extreme people on your side moves the Overton window in the wrong direction, so you have to be careful about how you do it.

I notice that you just rejected my framing and used a different framing. I wasn't talking about moving the Overton window, I was talking about moving the median, i.e., moving people around within the Overton window. I was just thinking about winning elections, not about shaping the future of discourse.

[silverspawn]

Evidence that the inclusive narrative hurts trans people:  here's destiny reading 30 emails from viewers of his stream verbatim. There's also the gdoc where they're printed. Here's #11, for example

“Anyway, after this long ramble I just want to say one thing on the broad subject. The term "transgender" is overly broad to the point where it's losing value as a descriptor. If people who don't have dysphoria or don't want to medically transition want to call themselves transgender then whatever, I don't care about what anyone does or doesn't want to do with their bodies or their social presentation. But we are not the same, and to lump us all under the same umbrella term does people like me a disservice, because it dilutes the importance of having the proper medical care. It's like if we didn't have words for "gay" or "lesbian" or "bisexual" and just called everyone who wasn't straight "queer". I really don't like it when people who don't have these intense life ruining issues I've had come in and start muddying the waters surrounding those issues. If people want to push for placing less importance on gender roles in society then sure, fine, that's probably a worthy cause. But don't do it by hijacking the discussion around a very specific issue related to a very specific group of people like me. If people want transgender to be an inclusive umbrella term for anyone who doesn't rigidly conform to the most strict definition of traditional gender then so be it, but we need new narrower terms to describe specific things.”

Ofc it depends on how common this view is, but given that it's outside the overton window and exactly the opposite of what gets amplified, my honest guess is that there are numerous people who feel that way.

[silverspawn]

To move the Overton window, you need the whole spectrum of views from slightly-to-your-side-from-center to crazy people who support a completely bonkers version of your side that isn't remotely socially acceptable, and various people on that spectrum will need to play their roles appropriately with respect to where on that spectrum they are. Blindly spending a lot of time criticizing the extreme people on your side moves the Overton window in the wrong direction, so you have to be careful about how you do it.

I notice that you just rejected my framing and used a different framing. I wasn't talking about moving the Overton window, I was talking about moving the median, i.e., moving people around within the Overton window. I was just thinking about winning elections, not about shaping the future of discourse.

This is also my response to this framing:

I decided to respond to this separately because it's really a different topic.

I think in order to discuss this on a level of evidence, we would first need to agree on specific time periods where either thing could be observed. You say there is lots of evidence; can you lay it out for me?

For the US, I would say: The extreme right has shifted further right pretty consistenty since Reagan and leading up to Trump. The extreme left, in the same time, has shifted towards the center under Clinton, then gradually shifted to the left during the later Obama years and more significantly starting with the 2016 primary.

I have no model of what causes the entire discourse to shift; I was talking about what makes existing people on the right more ore less likely to come to the left. My opinion is based mostly on hearing conservatives talk and a little on talking to them myself. So I don't think "how left is the entire country" is the right metric; if you wanted to use historical data, I'd more want to look at "which memes were popular at which times and who won elections at that point" although this is incredibly difficult since there are so many variables.

[silverspawn]

Ofc it depends on how common this view is, but given that it's outside the overton window and exactly the opposite of what gets amplified, my honest guess is that there are numerous people who feel that way.

Also Destiny mentioned somewhere that he gets hundreds of these emails, so it's not like he put all of them into the document.

[Awaclus]

I do agree that trans issues aren't that high up on the list of what the typical conservative worries about. So yeah as far as magnitude goes, other things like the abortion debate play a way bigger role. But other than that, I'm not convinced. (And I also think the small role still far outweighs the benefits of having an inclusive trans label.) Here's a hypothetical discussion I see as plausible to have with a conservative:

Conservative: The whole trans thing is just weird and creepy to me, people are cutting off their genitals and [...]
Me: There's pretty solid evidence that gender dysphoria is a thing, people with dysphoria have crazy elevated depression and suicide rates, and there's zero evidence that trying to cure them out of it works. It's like gay conversion therapy, it's been tried and just doesn't work. But there is solid evidence that transitioning does help. And if that's the only thing that helps these people, shouldn't they be allowed to go through with it?
Conservative (unless they're very radical): Ok in those cases, that's fair enough. But what about {some more radical thing leftist people believe}?
Me: Yeah that's stupid, I don't agree with that either.
Conservative: Oh okay. (is now .1% blue-pilled)

So yeah I don't think that going to suicide rates is a bad idea, and I also haven't been talked about of my main point which is that representing a moderate PoV is generally helpful and representing a radical PoV generally harmful for your side. Not as a politician, but as a random person in the discourse.

I don't think that's a realistic discussion. Conservatives don't care about evidence unless it's anecdotal and relatable, preferably something they have personally directly experienced (this is true of most people actually, but conservatives more so than progressives). If you absolutely insist on appealing to the suicide thing, instead of bringing up the suicide rates, you should bring up a specific person who is important to you in some way who was suicidal and transitioning helped them overcome that, and frame that as a story the conservative can relate to as much as possible.

It doesn't matter if you are a politician or a random person in the discourse. If you're a politician trying to get elected, then you might have to prioritize getting elected by gaming the political status quo over trying to shift it, but as long as your actual goal is to convince people of a thing, it works the same way for everyone.

I notice that you just rejected my framing and used a different framing. I wasn't talking about moving the Overton window, I was talking about moving the median, i.e., moving people around within the Overton window. I was just thinking about winning elections, not about shaping the future of discourse.

Moving the median necessarily always moves the Overton window and vice versa. Winning elections does not happen by having these kinds of arguments at all, it happens by convincing people that you are going to do the things they already agree with.

[Awaclus]

Evidence that the inclusive narrative hurts trans people:  here's destiny reading 30 emails from viewers of his stream verbatim. There's also the gdoc where they're printed. Here's #11, for example

“Anyway, after this long ramble I just want to say one thing on the broad subject. The term "transgender" is overly broad to the point where it's losing value as a descriptor. If people who don't have dysphoria or don't want to medically transition want to call themselves transgender then whatever, I don't care about what anyone does or doesn't want to do with their bodies or their social presentation. But we are not the same, and to lump us all under the same umbrella term does people like me a disservice, because it dilutes the importance of having the proper medical care. It's like if we didn't have words for "gay" or "lesbian" or "bisexual" and just called everyone who wasn't straight "queer". I really don't like it when people who don't have these intense life ruining issues I've had come in and start muddying the waters surrounding those issues. If people want to push for placing less importance on gender roles in society then sure, fine, that's probably a worthy cause. But don't do it by hijacking the discussion around a very specific issue related to a very specific group of people like me. If people want transgender to be an inclusive umbrella term for anyone who doesn't rigidly conform to the most strict definition of traditional gender then so be it, but we need new narrower terms to describe specific things.”

Ofc it depends on how common this view is, but given that it's outside the overton window and exactly the opposite of what gets amplified, my honest guess is that there are numerous people who feel that way.

I only read this one for now, but it's not really very different from my view, besides the "I really don't like it" part, which seems like a disproportionately strong reaction and appears to be more of a gut feeling than based on anything concrete.