Figuring out what “side” people are on is hard. There are all these pesky matters of nuance and perspective and critical thought. So instead, we’ve learned to ask a few simple questions. “Was the election stolen?” “Do ‘All Lives Matter’” “What is a woman?” It doesn’t matter if you believe your answer to these questions, it just matters that you give the correct one. Your answer declares your allegiance, not the truth.
As I've written before, I have known several transsexuals and dated two of them, in the full sense of the word. Just to reiterate, I support fair and just treatment to gender dysphoric people and would approve raising my taxes to provide for their needs.
But two points are being lost here.
1) Gender dysphoria is not part of "normal human variation" like left-handedness and homosexuality, both of which appear at about 5% across time and culture. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and not just because it has an entry in the big book (as homosexuality did until 1974). This is not a dodge into definitions; the dysphoric are suffering with a pain of feeling incongruous with their biology, suffering that is only relieved by medical intervention. Genuine dysphoria is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births. It is not at a level that demands changes to language and law, aside from prohibitions on discrimination.
2) At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers, demanding privileged treatment, demanding an extra ration of special attention from everyone. Online they are the angriest and most unbalanced people I have ever seen, unable to change the subject. And they demand to be under the "trans" umbrella, which they do not deserve. Gender is not a continuum; gender is binary. And no I am not talking about pink vs. blue or football vs. dolls, I am talking about identity.
There are a few people in the world who have two heads. We don't need to specify "monocephalous" when talking about everyone else, why do we need to refer to the overwhelming majority who are gender-congruent as "cis?"
"At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers"
Yeah, again, I think we're almost completely in agreement on non-binary people. This conversation just doesn't include them. I'll be as charitable as I can and say that rather than just being attention seekers I think some non-binary people are genuinely confused by being exposed to gender ideology at an early age. And, in the case of non-binary women, are trying to escape the expectations that a misogynistic society places on them.
I haven't written about non-binary people mainly because I'm trying to figure out how to do so without triggering any laser beams. But I will.
But when you talk about identity, no, I don't think gender identity is binary at all. There aren't two gender identities, there are ~8 billion. That's why I think it's so ridiculous to claim to be non-binary. Of course you are. Everybody is! Who is the man or woman at the 100% end of the "gender spectrum"?! There's a sex binary (male/female) and there's a gender spectrum so broad that it's best referred to as personality.
Of course we're all individually different. I'm a man who has zero interest in sports and who used to do cross-stitch. Does that compromise my biological maleness? No. It's just outside societal expectations that boys play football, work on cars, and lust after women.
A woman I knew online was at a teachers' meeting for the women at her school. At the end she piped "goodnight ladies!" and out in the parking lot one of the other women hurried to her and whispered that one of the other teachers is "nonbinary" and took offense at being called a "lady." What did she expect? Probably to get her own Special goodbye. This makes me sick.
I don't think you can talk about the new "trans" thing without bringing these piggybackers into the discussion. They are after all a few hundred times more numerous than actually dysphoric people. But you should scrupulously avoid mentioning them on Medium because you'll be banned in a heartbeat; Medium has elected to coddle these people and even using a gendered pronoun will get you ejected. I lost a thousand dollars a month income when one of the nastiest people in my decades online reported me for refusing to use "they." As if I had any reason to refer to her at all, I had already blocked her.
And it's the "they" thing that gives me a dog in this fight. On social networks I simply block those with they/them profiles, but these irritating people are demanding we drop gendered pronouns from the language. When I read the singular they it feels like walking into a telephone pole. It's not the hill I want to die on but I will never use it.
"When I read the singular they it feels like walking into a telephone pole"
Also, I love this line and feel exactly the same way. I'm actually in favour of a new gender neutral pronoun. But I'm not sacrificing the very useful "they."
We already have a gender-neutral singular but people call it "dehumanizing," The word is "it." OK if you refer to people like goldfish they're going to take offense. Well ... you don't want he or she, I m not using they for one person, that only leaves it.
The irony is that the same people who'll turn themselves inside out at "it" will proudly refer to themselves, and to me, as "queer," which is to say, defective and they will never honor my offense at it. NoooOOOOOoooo, it's my issue, I suffer from "internalized homophobia."
"The irony is that the same people who'll turn themselves inside out at "it" will proudly refer to themselves, and to me, as "queer," which is to say, defective and they will never honor my offense at it."
I've always thought it so strange that "queer" became, not only a term people used to refer to themselves, but a separate letter in the ever expanding alphabet soup.
And absolutely, isn't it interesting how the people who are so sensitive about labels think nothing about applying labels to other people, regardless of the feelings of those people.
I hear over and over again how people find terms like queer and cis offensive, yet I've never seen any of the "be kind" people respecting that.
"Probably to get her own Special goodbye. This makes me sick."
😅Every time I hear about something like this I'm reminded of this video (https://youtu.be/bX9FgvXZXZ8) from all the way back in 2019. Yes, I absolutely think she wanted her own goodbye. And indeed I think that most of these narcissists want the entire world to be tailored to their feelings in that moment. Neo-pronouns are another perfect example of this.
But yeah, I do consider transgender people separate from non-binary people, just as I consider the LGB community separate from trans people. There is overlap, and some people in each group have been convinced that they're all fighting the same battles, but the mindset and aims of these groups are meaningfully different.
I've seen a few people write about pronouns on Medium without being banned, so I think it's possible. But yeah, it'll take some care to write something that can't be mischaracterised as "hateful" by people acting in bad faith. I'll figure it out eventually!
I have long understood that men and women all have various elements of attributes associated with masculinity and femininely without cause for more than two genders.
I understand your use of "gender spectrum" for degrees of conformance to convention and pereception, but it is a large enough change in thinking to give people pause.
"I have long understood that men and women all have various elements of attributes associated with masculinity and femininely without cause for more than two genders"
When you say "gender" here are you referring to the terms male and female or man and woman or masculine and feminine? Again, this is the kind linguistic precision we need to try to really pin down. Here's my framing:
There are two sexes. Male and female. The words for these sexes when referring to human beings are man and woman. You can't be anything other than a man or a woman because you can't be anything other than a male or a female.
But gender, at least as it's used in most of these discussions, refers to the stereotypical expectations placed on men and women. We could use words like masculinity and femininity here. Masculinity and femininity clearly are spectrums. I have some masculine traits and some feminine traits but I'm still a man.
Everybody will have some varying combination of "gendered" traits, and I think it would be positive if we truly embraced greater expressions of femininity in men and masculinity in women. As long as we don't lose track of what men and women are in the process. Not sure if that clarifies things or not😅
Reality War. I like that. More to the point than my own term for it, Epistemological Crisis, which also includes the deprecation of truth on the right.
When we look back on this era, should anyone survive it, the disease of the age won't be Covid or HIV, it'll be relativism,
>" in their rush to be kind to one group, they overlook how callous they’re being to the other. "
I used to be all in for "empathy", believing it's largely what makes humans worthwhile as a species (to offset some of their other tendencies). I encouraged all forms of empathy.
But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy".
In tribal empathy, there are in groups and out groups; professing empathy for the ingroups is mandatory and lack thereof can be sinful; but professing empathy for anybody in an out group is socially punished as disloyalty to the tribe. People are trained to numb out any human empathy for members of "the other side". This kind of empathy is endemic and goes back to our prehistoric roots. (Perhaps, in less complex form, to pre-human roots; male chimpanzees groom and stroke other males who will fight with them against other bands).
By contrast, there is a flavor of empathy which arises spontaneously (not by command) and which can cross tribal boundaries to find a fragment of understandable humanity even in some in another tribe. This can be transcendant and transformative, and is closer to the inspiration for my original respect for empathy (which I still have, albeit in more nuanced form).
The former kind of empathy (tribal empathy) is just the "us" subset of an overall "us vs them" proclivity in humans. It can sometimes feel like a weaponized mutation of universal empathy but it's probably more primeval that the latter.
So nowadays when I see somebody advocating compassion for X, I ask myself whether the empathy energies are inherently tied to prescribed numbing of human empathy for a different group - or whether it's more universal (or individual).
In the present case, trans activism is definitely deep into tribal empathy - using mandatory (not emergent and inspired, but required) empathy for the feelings of trans folks, but inherently also prescribing a numbing of empathy for anybody else who may feel harmed. And the other side can do the same thing. People caring about both sides, and trying to find a nuanced compromise as respectful as feasible for everybody's needs - tend to be a small subset. For others, compromise is a dirty word, because it implies that other humans might have legitimate needs to be balanced against their own desires. Hence the prescribed numbing of empathy.
I want to note that a number of the trans folks I've known DO have empathy for the needs of cis women, and act accordingly. For every trans athlete entering women's sports, there are others who (mostly silently) abstain because it doesn't feel fair to them. But most of the personality type which is differentially attracted to trans activism seems to be amazingly unempathetic towards cis women's feelings and needs and highly entitled to have their own feelings and needs centered. This gives a distorted perspective to those who only encounter the louder activists and think them typical of all trans folks.
"But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy"."
Yeah, I'm not even sure that I'd describe the rush to be kind to one group as empathy. I think it's exceedingly self-serving in nature. It's the same kind of thing that leads people to lie when asked "Does my bum look big in this?"
There's a calculation taking place of "what will be the fallout if I give the 'honest (but "wrong")' vs 'affirming (but false)' answer?" And right now, without a doubt, the easiest thing to do is affirm all the insanity. After all, sticking your head above the parapet and saying what you really think will almost certainly have meaningful social consequences and may well affect your employment.
Whereas, even amongst women, most of them aren't athletes or in prison, and rates of sexual assault in bathrooms and changing rooms are low enough that they can afford to roll the dice.
Most people have bought into the oft-repeated lie that any pushback on trans issues is born out of hatred. And because they aren't aware of the implications of self-ID, they just go along with the dogma. There was a BBC poll that laid this out quite well recently (https://comresglobal.com/polls/bbc-scotland-gender-recognition-act-poll-17-february/).
Baseline support for trans people was high, as you'd expect, but that changed when it came to issues like whether males should compete with females in sport or males being housed with females, the numbers were very different.
I want to add a link my partner just passed to me, to some research which shows that people scoring higher in empathy are associated with more polarization and out-group hatred. I suspect that the scales are reflecting the effects of what I call "tribal empathy", which seems far more prevalent today, presumably also within representative test subjects.
The strong empathetic emotional connection to an ingroup, along with politics which highlight harm to that in-group, can lead more empathy driven people to have more negative emotions about the "harmful" out-group. Or in my own framing, tapping into us/them dynamics to generate weaponized (tribal) empathy will lead to a net increase in overall hostility. Empathize with a few anecdotal stories of harm, then demonize huge groups of people with the emotional rebound.
In everyday social and business transactions I really don't care about sex, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, political worldviews, etc. They are absolutely irrelevant to me. If someone can tell me why they should be relevant, I'll listen.
The exception, perhaps, is if, and only if, they have a chip on their shoulder about it that causes them to come across as an asshole. That makes it about being an asshole, rather than the issue that causes them to be one.
As I've written before, I have known several transsexuals and dated two of them, in the full sense of the word. Just to reiterate, I support fair and just treatment to gender dysphoric people and would approve raising my taxes to provide for their needs.
But two points are being lost here.
1) Gender dysphoria is not part of "normal human variation" like left-handedness and homosexuality, both of which appear at about 5% across time and culture. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and not just because it has an entry in the big book (as homosexuality did until 1974). This is not a dodge into definitions; the dysphoric are suffering with a pain of feeling incongruous with their biology, suffering that is only relieved by medical intervention. Genuine dysphoria is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births. It is not at a level that demands changes to language and law, aside from prohibitions on discrimination.
2) At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers, demanding privileged treatment, demanding an extra ration of special attention from everyone. Online they are the angriest and most unbalanced people I have ever seen, unable to change the subject. And they demand to be under the "trans" umbrella, which they do not deserve. Gender is not a continuum; gender is binary. And no I am not talking about pink vs. blue or football vs. dolls, I am talking about identity.
There are a few people in the world who have two heads. We don't need to specify "monocephalous" when talking about everyone else, why do we need to refer to the overwhelming majority who are gender-congruent as "cis?"
"At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers"
Yeah, again, I think we're almost completely in agreement on non-binary people. This conversation just doesn't include them. I'll be as charitable as I can and say that rather than just being attention seekers I think some non-binary people are genuinely confused by being exposed to gender ideology at an early age. And, in the case of non-binary women, are trying to escape the expectations that a misogynistic society places on them.
I haven't written about non-binary people mainly because I'm trying to figure out how to do so without triggering any laser beams. But I will.
But when you talk about identity, no, I don't think gender identity is binary at all. There aren't two gender identities, there are ~8 billion. That's why I think it's so ridiculous to claim to be non-binary. Of course you are. Everybody is! Who is the man or woman at the 100% end of the "gender spectrum"?! There's a sex binary (male/female) and there's a gender spectrum so broad that it's best referred to as personality.
Of course we're all individually different. I'm a man who has zero interest in sports and who used to do cross-stitch. Does that compromise my biological maleness? No. It's just outside societal expectations that boys play football, work on cars, and lust after women.
A woman I knew online was at a teachers' meeting for the women at her school. At the end she piped "goodnight ladies!" and out in the parking lot one of the other women hurried to her and whispered that one of the other teachers is "nonbinary" and took offense at being called a "lady." What did she expect? Probably to get her own Special goodbye. This makes me sick.
I don't think you can talk about the new "trans" thing without bringing these piggybackers into the discussion. They are after all a few hundred times more numerous than actually dysphoric people. But you should scrupulously avoid mentioning them on Medium because you'll be banned in a heartbeat; Medium has elected to coddle these people and even using a gendered pronoun will get you ejected. I lost a thousand dollars a month income when one of the nastiest people in my decades online reported me for refusing to use "they." As if I had any reason to refer to her at all, I had already blocked her.
And it's the "they" thing that gives me a dog in this fight. On social networks I simply block those with they/them profiles, but these irritating people are demanding we drop gendered pronouns from the language. When I read the singular they it feels like walking into a telephone pole. It's not the hill I want to die on but I will never use it.
"When I read the singular they it feels like walking into a telephone pole"
Also, I love this line and feel exactly the same way. I'm actually in favour of a new gender neutral pronoun. But I'm not sacrificing the very useful "they."
We already have a gender-neutral singular but people call it "dehumanizing," The word is "it." OK if you refer to people like goldfish they're going to take offense. Well ... you don't want he or she, I m not using they for one person, that only leaves it.
The irony is that the same people who'll turn themselves inside out at "it" will proudly refer to themselves, and to me, as "queer," which is to say, defective and they will never honor my offense at it. NoooOOOOOoooo, it's my issue, I suffer from "internalized homophobia."
Door's over there. Don't darken it again.
"The irony is that the same people who'll turn themselves inside out at "it" will proudly refer to themselves, and to me, as "queer," which is to say, defective and they will never honor my offense at it."
I've always thought it so strange that "queer" became, not only a term people used to refer to themselves, but a separate letter in the ever expanding alphabet soup.
And absolutely, isn't it interesting how the people who are so sensitive about labels think nothing about applying labels to other people, regardless of the feelings of those people.
I hear over and over again how people find terms like queer and cis offensive, yet I've never seen any of the "be kind" people respecting that.
"Probably to get her own Special goodbye. This makes me sick."
😅Every time I hear about something like this I'm reminded of this video (https://youtu.be/bX9FgvXZXZ8) from all the way back in 2019. Yes, I absolutely think she wanted her own goodbye. And indeed I think that most of these narcissists want the entire world to be tailored to their feelings in that moment. Neo-pronouns are another perfect example of this.
But yeah, I do consider transgender people separate from non-binary people, just as I consider the LGB community separate from trans people. There is overlap, and some people in each group have been convinced that they're all fighting the same battles, but the mindset and aims of these groups are meaningfully different.
I've seen a few people write about pronouns on Medium without being banned, so I think it's possible. But yeah, it'll take some care to write something that can't be mischaracterised as "hateful" by people acting in bad faith. I'll figure it out eventually!
"Every time I hear about something like this I'm reminded of this video (https://youtu.be/bX9FgvXZXZ8)"
Jesus.
I'd have left that meeting on a stretcher or in handcuffs. Maybe both.
Hi my name is Blither Ingidiot, he/him.
I have long understood that men and women all have various elements of attributes associated with masculinity and femininely without cause for more than two genders.
I understand your use of "gender spectrum" for degrees of conformance to convention and pereception, but it is a large enough change in thinking to give people pause.
"I have long understood that men and women all have various elements of attributes associated with masculinity and femininely without cause for more than two genders"
When you say "gender" here are you referring to the terms male and female or man and woman or masculine and feminine? Again, this is the kind linguistic precision we need to try to really pin down. Here's my framing:
There are two sexes. Male and female. The words for these sexes when referring to human beings are man and woman. You can't be anything other than a man or a woman because you can't be anything other than a male or a female.
But gender, at least as it's used in most of these discussions, refers to the stereotypical expectations placed on men and women. We could use words like masculinity and femininity here. Masculinity and femininity clearly are spectrums. I have some masculine traits and some feminine traits but I'm still a man.
Everybody will have some varying combination of "gendered" traits, and I think it would be positive if we truly embraced greater expressions of femininity in men and masculinity in women. As long as we don't lose track of what men and women are in the process. Not sure if that clarifies things or not😅
Reality War. I like that. More to the point than my own term for it, Epistemological Crisis, which also includes the deprecation of truth on the right.
When we look back on this era, should anyone survive it, the disease of the age won't be Covid or HIV, it'll be relativism,
But that's just me being *subjective*
>" in their rush to be kind to one group, they overlook how callous they’re being to the other. "
I used to be all in for "empathy", believing it's largely what makes humans worthwhile as a species (to offset some of their other tendencies). I encouraged all forms of empathy.
But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy".
In tribal empathy, there are in groups and out groups; professing empathy for the ingroups is mandatory and lack thereof can be sinful; but professing empathy for anybody in an out group is socially punished as disloyalty to the tribe. People are trained to numb out any human empathy for members of "the other side". This kind of empathy is endemic and goes back to our prehistoric roots. (Perhaps, in less complex form, to pre-human roots; male chimpanzees groom and stroke other males who will fight with them against other bands).
By contrast, there is a flavor of empathy which arises spontaneously (not by command) and which can cross tribal boundaries to find a fragment of understandable humanity even in some in another tribe. This can be transcendant and transformative, and is closer to the inspiration for my original respect for empathy (which I still have, albeit in more nuanced form).
The former kind of empathy (tribal empathy) is just the "us" subset of an overall "us vs them" proclivity in humans. It can sometimes feel like a weaponized mutation of universal empathy but it's probably more primeval that the latter.
So nowadays when I see somebody advocating compassion for X, I ask myself whether the empathy energies are inherently tied to prescribed numbing of human empathy for a different group - or whether it's more universal (or individual).
In the present case, trans activism is definitely deep into tribal empathy - using mandatory (not emergent and inspired, but required) empathy for the feelings of trans folks, but inherently also prescribing a numbing of empathy for anybody else who may feel harmed. And the other side can do the same thing. People caring about both sides, and trying to find a nuanced compromise as respectful as feasible for everybody's needs - tend to be a small subset. For others, compromise is a dirty word, because it implies that other humans might have legitimate needs to be balanced against their own desires. Hence the prescribed numbing of empathy.
I want to note that a number of the trans folks I've known DO have empathy for the needs of cis women, and act accordingly. For every trans athlete entering women's sports, there are others who (mostly silently) abstain because it doesn't feel fair to them. But most of the personality type which is differentially attracted to trans activism seems to be amazingly unempathetic towards cis women's feelings and needs and highly entitled to have their own feelings and needs centered. This gives a distorted perspective to those who only encounter the louder activists and think them typical of all trans folks.
"But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy"."
Yeah, I'm not even sure that I'd describe the rush to be kind to one group as empathy. I think it's exceedingly self-serving in nature. It's the same kind of thing that leads people to lie when asked "Does my bum look big in this?"
There's a calculation taking place of "what will be the fallout if I give the 'honest (but "wrong")' vs 'affirming (but false)' answer?" And right now, without a doubt, the easiest thing to do is affirm all the insanity. After all, sticking your head above the parapet and saying what you really think will almost certainly have meaningful social consequences and may well affect your employment.
Whereas, even amongst women, most of them aren't athletes or in prison, and rates of sexual assault in bathrooms and changing rooms are low enough that they can afford to roll the dice.
Most people have bought into the oft-repeated lie that any pushback on trans issues is born out of hatred. And because they aren't aware of the implications of self-ID, they just go along with the dogma. There was a BBC poll that laid this out quite well recently (https://comresglobal.com/polls/bbc-scotland-gender-recognition-act-poll-17-february/).
Baseline support for trans people was high, as you'd expect, but that changed when it came to issues like whether males should compete with females in sport or males being housed with females, the numbers were very different.
I want to add a link my partner just passed to me, to some research which shows that people scoring higher in empathy are associated with more polarization and out-group hatred. I suspect that the scales are reflecting the effects of what I call "tribal empathy", which seems far more prevalent today, presumably also within representative test subjects.
The strong empathetic emotional connection to an ingroup, along with politics which highlight harm to that in-group, can lead more empathy driven people to have more negative emotions about the "harmful" out-group. Or in my own framing, tapping into us/them dynamics to generate weaponized (tribal) empathy will lead to a net increase in overall hostility. Empathize with a few anecdotal stories of harm, then demonize huge groups of people with the emotional rebound.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/how-empathic-concern-fuels-political-polarization/8115DB5BDE548FF6AB04DA661F83785E
In everyday social and business transactions I really don't care about sex, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, political worldviews, etc. They are absolutely irrelevant to me. If someone can tell me why they should be relevant, I'll listen.
The exception, perhaps, is if, and only if, they have a chip on their shoulder about it that causes them to come across as an asshole. That makes it about being an asshole, rather than the issue that causes them to be one.
"That makes it about being an asshole, rather than the issue that causes them to be one."
Haha, bingo.