"If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it? Don't talk about things you don't understand. Don't talk about other people's lives and experiences as if you knew better than them. 2023 seems to be a bit late a year to still have to teach, to adults, that if you still insist to ta…
"If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it? Don't talk about things you don't understand. Don't talk about other people's lives and experiences as if you knew better than them. 2023 seems to be a bit late a year to still have to teach, to adults, that if you still insist to talk about things of which you have no experience and that you don't understand, you'll have to accept the consequences."
This logic drives me crazy. I cut my teeth, largely through historical accident, on writing about human sexuality. I was bombarded on all sides with criticisms as my writing reached wider and wider audiences. First, trickled in the responses that I'm not doing enough. "Your writing is almost entirely heteronormative (odd, seeing as I myself may be hetero but my relationships and those I discuss are decidedly not normative). I wrote what I'm familiar with—at first. As I wrote more, I expanded to more and more topics that I have less and less, if any, experience with. Then it became, "How dare you write about things you have no experience with?"
The message was clear: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you write about the heteronormative relationships you're intimately familiar with, you're ignoring other people's situation. If you write about their situation, you're speaking about the experience of others without any real experience of your own.
What seems lost is a combination of two ideas:
1. That there's merit in both objectivity, observation of things from the outside, AND the phenomena and emotions of personal subjective experience. Both are merited and powerful forms of inquiry and neither should be shunned in favor of the other, as modern science and phenomenology have both shown, concerning the former and latter, respectively.
2. That there's value in ideas that don't confirm our inner experiences. I wonder how much of this is a byproduct of our technologies that feed us things we agree with, things we like, things that make us feel positive feelings via algorithm all day long. When all you've known or most of what you've known has been carefully hand-picked to conform to your biases, and it streams through a screen you stare at all day, that's bound to have some consequences. It's no wonder we can't engage with daring ideas anymore, let alone ideas that don't perfect conform to our preconceived molds about how the things and events in the world ought to be.
I absolutely must reiterate that I have many friends in the LGBTQ community and these pseudo-activists represent precisely none of them, and make them feel uncomfortable, probably in the same way the loud-mouth Trump and all of his ideological Republican minions don't represent me, a ginger-haired pasty white American dude who just happens to match the demographic of their most die-hard voters.
"Then it became, 'How dare you write about things you have no experience with?'"
Yep, couldn't agree more with all of this. I also hate the implication that empathy and our common humanity are useless in the face of these arbitrary boundaries. Nobody knows what it's like to be in somebody else's skin. I don't even know what it's like to be black or male or straight or any other "identity." I just know what it's like to be me. To understand other black males better, I still need to talk to them.
Most of all, I hate the hypocrisy of these people who are invariably happy to preach to other people about their experience. I don't know what it's like to be *insert identity group of choice here*, but you know all about me and how easy my life is, right?
Astute observation. It’s definitely an in-group/out-group sorting mechanism with which some people perch themselves atop lofty mountains and can pretend they’re the bastions of human experience (not to mention the judge and jury).
There is a place for "lived experience." It's called "literature," or "art." There is a place for objectivity, or shared experience, and it is called "science" in the broadest sense of the term.
Applying the epistemology of the former to the latter, as do the critical theorists, makes the latter impossible. That is why it is civilization-destroying. As if the critical theorists could care.
That's a little dramatic. First, phenomenological philosophy is some of the best philosophy one can read (highly recommended) and it takes the first-person perspective as its starting point. I hardly think that a small minority of people who are basically professional whiners are "civilization destroying" no matter how loudly they whine.
They can barely even win a handful of national offices in the ultra-safe districts. It's a tiny, tiny minority, even among left-wing voters (and I'd be willing to bet even among people who lean progressive), which is evinced by the fact that, in the US, we have a boring, middle-of-the-road President Biden and not a hardcore left-wing Bernie Sanders or, somewhat more mildly, Elizabeth Warren.
Annoying isn't the same thing as "civilization destroying" and we should keep that in mind.
Whether I am right or you are right depends on how far and deep it spreads beyond where phenomenological philosophy was originally intended. Some critical theorists extend it even to mathematics. Not many now, and let’s hope it stays that way. Better to nip nihilistic poison in the bud.
I've comfortably settled on the fact that there's just always going to be a minority population in every group of people who are just thoroughly crazy.
It has already spread much farther than I thought possible. Trans ideology that is now orthodoxy in the Anglophone world and much of Western Europe. The credo “trans women are [literally!] women” is the epistemic equivalent of the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, in that both are a form of transubstantiation.
This is no longer a fringe minority view. Even Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson felt constrained to deny it.
I think most people say “trans women are women” because they want to be nice, like a title. Coleman Hughes’ analogy is apt here. An atheist might use the term “father” or “priest” or “nun” when speaking about a clergy member. I do, even if I don’t believe in Catholic anything. Doesn’t mean I believe the ideology. I’m just being nice and that’s an important distinction to make. Most people want to be civil and Tunisian d .
Not being able to define a woman is legitimately a hard question. Steve QJ up there will tell you a woman is defined solely by the gametes. Does that mean that every single biologist in the field has killed or anesthetized every single animal they’ve observed to take a good look at their gametes? Of course not. They observed secondary sex characteristics. Does that mean all of biology is wrong? Also no. It just means that sex is complicated and tied up in a plethora of factors including sex cells, reproduction, hormones, phenotypes, mating patterns, behavior patterns, evolutionary pressures, and much, much, much more. As someone whose daily career is spent analyzing sex itself, I can say that’s a legitimately hard question to ask, one that nobody in good faith can give a straight, simple answer to.
"Steve QJ up there will tell you a woman is defined solely by the gametes. Does that mean that every single biologist in the field has killed or anesthetized every single animal they’ve observed to take a good look at their gametes?"
AAARGGGHH!! This argument is so face-meltingly silly!!😅
Can you tell the difference between a dog and a cat just by looking? Or do you have to sequence the DNA of each animal you encounter? If a person with male external genitalia came up to you and asked you why "they" were having trouble getting pregnant, would you find that a "legitimately hard question"? Would you need to kill or anaesthatise me before you could tell that I have some sub-saharan ancestry?
The idea that our appearance is somehow divorced from our biology is just so...I don't even know how to finish that sentence.
As I've said several times here and elsewhere, secondary sex characteristics, especially external genitalia, line up with biological sex (i.e."sex cells, reproduction, hormones, phenotypes, mating patterns, behavior patterns, evolutionary pressures, and much, much, much more") in 99.98% of cases. Not just in humans, but in every single sexually dimorphic species. That's as good as it gets in biology or pretty much anything else.
You can have almost exactly the same degree of certainty that you've sexed somebody correctly by glancing at external genitalia as you can that if you flip a coin it won't land on its edge but on heads or tails (that's not hyperbole, I can dig up the number on this).
Plus, as every teenage boy in the world can attest, you don't have to kill an organism to get a look at its gametes.😉
Yesterday at the grocery store I again encountered Jake the cashier. Name tag filled from corner to corner with the block printed name JAKE. An apron purposefully hiding the presence of breasts. Very short hair curled at the ends. Not at all butch. That day a face mask so only her eyes were visible. Beautiful feminine eyes without makeup that crushed the attempted androgyny and yet subtle or I would not have noticed the androgyny.
The sex binary is anisogamy, pure and simple, for the overwhelming majority of the animal and plant world including primates--large and small gametes, ova and sperm, pistil and stamen. Everything else is variable and on a statistically dimorphic spectrum, including chromosomes and secondary sex characteristics. All the recent confusion ideologically, not empirically, motivated.
I have long enjoyed your writing on Medium. Thank you and goodnight.
Btw I was not referring to politics per se but to education media and cultural and other institutions that govern knowledge. There is where the deepest and most damaging inroads have occurred. I happen to like Elizabeth Warren and her protégée Katie Porter very much.
I'll add to that: the worst thing you can do is let anyone trick you into believing that minority is a majority. I too like Elizabeth Warren. I would've voted for her had she still been in the race by the time Florida's primaries started, but alas. What are the odds?
I advise caution because when they (someone, anyone) convince you that the threat is bigger than it really is, it's *very* easy to become the monster you set out to smite in the first place. There are millions of Americans who would, right now, trade our Democracy for Autocracy for a chance to own the "woke mob" and wouldn't think twice about it, arguably about half of one of our two major political parties—and they're still a tiny minority of a minority.
It's good to keep things in perspective that less than 30% of people belong to ANY given political party.
An excellent example of the ideologically motivated, phenomenological rot invading the hard sciences, Joe. From Jesse Singal’s most recent post. Not good.
Joe! I remember you. I always liked your articles on Medium. I'm not on there, kicked off for not being woke enough. Anyway, I'll check out your Substack.
"If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it? Don't talk about things you don't understand. Don't talk about other people's lives and experiences as if you knew better than them. 2023 seems to be a bit late a year to still have to teach, to adults, that if you still insist to talk about things of which you have no experience and that you don't understand, you'll have to accept the consequences."
This logic drives me crazy. I cut my teeth, largely through historical accident, on writing about human sexuality. I was bombarded on all sides with criticisms as my writing reached wider and wider audiences. First, trickled in the responses that I'm not doing enough. "Your writing is almost entirely heteronormative (odd, seeing as I myself may be hetero but my relationships and those I discuss are decidedly not normative). I wrote what I'm familiar with—at first. As I wrote more, I expanded to more and more topics that I have less and less, if any, experience with. Then it became, "How dare you write about things you have no experience with?"
The message was clear: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you write about the heteronormative relationships you're intimately familiar with, you're ignoring other people's situation. If you write about their situation, you're speaking about the experience of others without any real experience of your own.
What seems lost is a combination of two ideas:
1. That there's merit in both objectivity, observation of things from the outside, AND the phenomena and emotions of personal subjective experience. Both are merited and powerful forms of inquiry and neither should be shunned in favor of the other, as modern science and phenomenology have both shown, concerning the former and latter, respectively.
2. That there's value in ideas that don't confirm our inner experiences. I wonder how much of this is a byproduct of our technologies that feed us things we agree with, things we like, things that make us feel positive feelings via algorithm all day long. When all you've known or most of what you've known has been carefully hand-picked to conform to your biases, and it streams through a screen you stare at all day, that's bound to have some consequences. It's no wonder we can't engage with daring ideas anymore, let alone ideas that don't perfect conform to our preconceived molds about how the things and events in the world ought to be.
I absolutely must reiterate that I have many friends in the LGBTQ community and these pseudo-activists represent precisely none of them, and make them feel uncomfortable, probably in the same way the loud-mouth Trump and all of his ideological Republican minions don't represent me, a ginger-haired pasty white American dude who just happens to match the demographic of their most die-hard voters.
"Then it became, 'How dare you write about things you have no experience with?'"
Yep, couldn't agree more with all of this. I also hate the implication that empathy and our common humanity are useless in the face of these arbitrary boundaries. Nobody knows what it's like to be in somebody else's skin. I don't even know what it's like to be black or male or straight or any other "identity." I just know what it's like to be me. To understand other black males better, I still need to talk to them.
Most of all, I hate the hypocrisy of these people who are invariably happy to preach to other people about their experience. I don't know what it's like to be *insert identity group of choice here*, but you know all about me and how easy my life is, right?
Astute observation. It’s definitely an in-group/out-group sorting mechanism with which some people perch themselves atop lofty mountains and can pretend they’re the bastions of human experience (not to mention the judge and jury).
There is a place for "lived experience." It's called "literature," or "art." There is a place for objectivity, or shared experience, and it is called "science" in the broadest sense of the term.
Applying the epistemology of the former to the latter, as do the critical theorists, makes the latter impossible. That is why it is civilization-destroying. As if the critical theorists could care.
That's a little dramatic. First, phenomenological philosophy is some of the best philosophy one can read (highly recommended) and it takes the first-person perspective as its starting point. I hardly think that a small minority of people who are basically professional whiners are "civilization destroying" no matter how loudly they whine.
They can barely even win a handful of national offices in the ultra-safe districts. It's a tiny, tiny minority, even among left-wing voters (and I'd be willing to bet even among people who lean progressive), which is evinced by the fact that, in the US, we have a boring, middle-of-the-road President Biden and not a hardcore left-wing Bernie Sanders or, somewhat more mildly, Elizabeth Warren.
Annoying isn't the same thing as "civilization destroying" and we should keep that in mind.
Whether I am right or you are right depends on how far and deep it spreads beyond where phenomenological philosophy was originally intended. Some critical theorists extend it even to mathematics. Not many now, and let’s hope it stays that way. Better to nip nihilistic poison in the bud.
I've comfortably settled on the fact that there's just always going to be a minority population in every group of people who are just thoroughly crazy.
It has already spread much farther than I thought possible. Trans ideology that is now orthodoxy in the Anglophone world and much of Western Europe. The credo “trans women are [literally!] women” is the epistemic equivalent of the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, in that both are a form of transubstantiation.
This is no longer a fringe minority view. Even Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson felt constrained to deny it.
Those are two completely separate issues though.
I think most people say “trans women are women” because they want to be nice, like a title. Coleman Hughes’ analogy is apt here. An atheist might use the term “father” or “priest” or “nun” when speaking about a clergy member. I do, even if I don’t believe in Catholic anything. Doesn’t mean I believe the ideology. I’m just being nice and that’s an important distinction to make. Most people want to be civil and Tunisian d .
Not being able to define a woman is legitimately a hard question. Steve QJ up there will tell you a woman is defined solely by the gametes. Does that mean that every single biologist in the field has killed or anesthetized every single animal they’ve observed to take a good look at their gametes? Of course not. They observed secondary sex characteristics. Does that mean all of biology is wrong? Also no. It just means that sex is complicated and tied up in a plethora of factors including sex cells, reproduction, hormones, phenotypes, mating patterns, behavior patterns, evolutionary pressures, and much, much, much more. As someone whose daily career is spent analyzing sex itself, I can say that’s a legitimately hard question to ask, one that nobody in good faith can give a straight, simple answer to.
"Steve QJ up there will tell you a woman is defined solely by the gametes. Does that mean that every single biologist in the field has killed or anesthetized every single animal they’ve observed to take a good look at their gametes?"
AAARGGGHH!! This argument is so face-meltingly silly!!😅
Can you tell the difference between a dog and a cat just by looking? Or do you have to sequence the DNA of each animal you encounter? If a person with male external genitalia came up to you and asked you why "they" were having trouble getting pregnant, would you find that a "legitimately hard question"? Would you need to kill or anaesthatise me before you could tell that I have some sub-saharan ancestry?
The idea that our appearance is somehow divorced from our biology is just so...I don't even know how to finish that sentence.
As I've said several times here and elsewhere, secondary sex characteristics, especially external genitalia, line up with biological sex (i.e."sex cells, reproduction, hormones, phenotypes, mating patterns, behavior patterns, evolutionary pressures, and much, much, much more") in 99.98% of cases. Not just in humans, but in every single sexually dimorphic species. That's as good as it gets in biology or pretty much anything else.
You can have almost exactly the same degree of certainty that you've sexed somebody correctly by glancing at external genitalia as you can that if you flip a coin it won't land on its edge but on heads or tails (that's not hyperbole, I can dig up the number on this).
Plus, as every teenage boy in the world can attest, you don't have to kill an organism to get a look at its gametes.😉
Yesterday at the grocery store I again encountered Jake the cashier. Name tag filled from corner to corner with the block printed name JAKE. An apron purposefully hiding the presence of breasts. Very short hair curled at the ends. Not at all butch. That day a face mask so only her eyes were visible. Beautiful feminine eyes without makeup that crushed the attempted androgyny and yet subtle or I would not have noticed the androgyny.
At first glance there are people who pass as the opposite gender, until you look critically. Beautiful men and handsome women but there is this. https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*96H2OommkTPWcEnVtDv7Rw.jpeg
Nature makes scientific proof of gender largely unnecessary.
"Blasphemous," but true... Evolution is vastly cleverer than ideologues.
Yes I get it. If you squint hard enough, everything becomes blurry. Or incoherent.
Just asking for consistency. 🤷♂️
Anyways, it’s late. It’s midnight. I’m off to bed. Good talking to y’all. ✌️
The sex binary is anisogamy, pure and simple, for the overwhelming majority of the animal and plant world including primates--large and small gametes, ova and sperm, pistil and stamen. Everything else is variable and on a statistically dimorphic spectrum, including chromosomes and secondary sex characteristics. All the recent confusion ideologically, not empirically, motivated.
I have long enjoyed your writing on Medium. Thank you and goodnight.
Mike
Btw I was not referring to politics per se but to education media and cultural and other institutions that govern knowledge. There is where the deepest and most damaging inroads have occurred. I happen to like Elizabeth Warren and her protégée Katie Porter very much.
I'll add to that: the worst thing you can do is let anyone trick you into believing that minority is a majority. I too like Elizabeth Warren. I would've voted for her had she still been in the race by the time Florida's primaries started, but alas. What are the odds?
I advise caution because when they (someone, anyone) convince you that the threat is bigger than it really is, it's *very* easy to become the monster you set out to smite in the first place. There are millions of Americans who would, right now, trade our Democracy for Autocracy for a chance to own the "woke mob" and wouldn't think twice about it, arguably about half of one of our two major political parties—and they're still a tiny minority of a minority.
It's good to keep things in perspective that less than 30% of people belong to ANY given political party.
The two sides feed off each other
An excellent example of the ideologically motivated, phenomenological rot invading the hard sciences, Joe. From Jesse Singal’s most recent post. Not good.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jessesingal/p/i-still-dont-understand-the-point?r=9oxmc&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Arrgg!
Joe! I remember you. I always liked your articles on Medium. I'm not on there, kicked off for not being woke enough. Anyway, I'll check out your Substack.
I love the attitude and confidence of the id @growsomelabia. Own that :)
Why, thank you 🙏🏻