OG readers of The Commentary will remember Ray. Ray and I went back and forth on racial issues numerous times (Ray was a big fan of the “all white people are racist” rhetoric). So you can imagine how indignant I was when the most eloquent refutation of his ideas didn’t even include me. Ray got into an argument about feminism with a writer named Casira (Ray took a “feminists don’t want equality, they want to oppress men” stance), and Casira had the presence of mind to ask how he’d respond if a white person claimed that “anti-racists” don’t want equality, they want to oppress white people. The hypocrisy was so glaring that even Ray couldn’t miss it.
I have performed electrical, mechanical and plumbing tasks. Connectors for those things are gendered according to physical characteristics that even children understand without explanation. You cannot treat the genders of those things as a social construct unless having your house burn down, flood or your automobile fall apart is OK with you. It took a little time, but I understand that trans people are using words long familiar to me in a new way. I understand that and can get past its dissonance. I won't participate in a debate where someone claims that the mental construct defines the physical with radicals. They do a disservice to the honest trans-people.
Race has a different relationship between the physical and attitudes. My daughter's 23andme DNA adventure makes it quite clear that there is an actual definable physical reality to "race." But my wife and I didn't burst into flames when we had sex and our children were in no way defective because of the racial differences.
In the grand scheme of things those differences are small, even though they are unambiguously observable in my wife and me, our daughters less so as an observable blend. They've heard the words, "What are you?" and "Where are you from?" many times. Asians are thought of as foreign by both black and white Americans.
How small are the differences? We all have more Neanderthal DNA than 90% of the people in the 23andme database, and our daughter has a little more than either my wife or me since some of our DNA is different. You couldn't look at any of us and say, "Neanderthal, Neanderthal!" and that is non-homosapien genome. They have a list of stuff that that DNA might make us more prone to, but they are things that other humans are also prone to without that DNA.
I would say that racism, but not race is a social construct. 𝘐𝘧 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵. We 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 completely ignore "race" and I think it possible 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒂𝒚 if we can get past the "Oh woe is me, I'm a victim. You owe me because of the sins of our ancestors" stuff. If that sounds like I'm saying who is the biggest impediment to good change, yes, yes, I am. I mention that because I see the trans-radicals as the biggest impediment to change. If you walk around with a chip on your shoulder, daring people to knock it off, some will see the best way of doing that as knocking you down. And you can count on it, someone will.
All that to say, we cannot honestly deny physical reality, but we can productively shape our attitudes about it (when it matters and when it shouldn't). Unfortunately, that is often difficult even without the radical assholes ruining conversation.
That goes to the heart of the matter. It is imperative that we don't abandon acknowledgement of reality with a dystopian destruction of language to achieve political ends.
While the slippery slope argument is technically a fallacy leading to logical extremes, we now live in a world of those extremes. To be fair and decent humans we do sometimes position ourselves on that slope where the issue becomes, how far down the slope do we dare stand?
The trans movement borrows from many social justice movements. The complaint that they just need to be 'heard' and are 'being shut down' is taken straight from feminism's playbook. I heard the 'women are being silenced' BS so much from the Medium Misandrist Mavens that I wrote an article about how women who can't shut up about how oppressed they feel are always going on about how they aren't 'heard'. Maybe they're just being shut out by people who are tired of hearing the same-old same-old.
There is no group less unheard than the trans movement. In fact, they're way better at feminists at being heard because no one's going to stop a man from saying his piece, whereas women are easier to intimidate. Many women still are unheard, but the ones who are heard the most are the ones who complain the loudest.
It's bullshit that either women or transwomen are not being 'heard'. What they *mean* is that they're not being persuasive.
Their problem is that they want to be seen and believed to be women, or men in the case of trans-men. I can understand that desire, but when it becomes a demand people don't fall in line with what they think is unreasonable. I have a surprising to myself empathy and sympathy for their plight. I've spoken to people still employed in the corporate world, and they have the ear of HR. Misgendering (sic) is reaching a level of a white person using the N-word (escorted out the door with your stuff in a cardboard box). To say that they are not heard is preposterous. It will bring resentment at a level disastrous to their cause.
Gender dysphoria is three times more common in men than women; one in 30,000 men and one in 100,000 women. Yet there has been an enormous surge in young women claiming to be "trans," up 4000% since 2006. I don't believe for a second that this is some environmental factor like earlier breast development (traced to soaring fat content in alleged American food) nor is it more candid reporting.
Said it before, saying it again: no dysphoria, no "trans." The activists call this "medicalizing" what should be a "choice." This infuriates. Well, in real dysphorics the sense of being in the wrong body is so agonizing that some suicide, and if that isn't a medical condition then I don't know what is.
I don't think I've written this here before, I beg pardon if I have but.
I see bigotry as Stage Theory, like Piaget's intellectual development or Kohlberg's moral development.
Stage One; unrepentant mindless bigot. Comfortable using the N-bomb, hates everybody; black and brown people. Muslims, Asians, gays. This needs no further explanation.
Stage Two: What we are calling "woke." Race is a social construct, interfertility and melanin continua mean that there are no races, a "trans" woman is really a woman. There are no categories and any acknowledgement of differences is indistinguishably extreme bigotry. This is better than One but it is likely to collapse under its own falsehood; it's just as false as Stage One.
Stage Three: Differences are real and they are not inferiorities. We accept them, maybe revel in them.
I try to live my life as Stage Three, I don't always succeed. Indians are a real challenge for me.
I may have mentioned this before, but early in my marriage I said, "Steve (actual name forgotten) is a nice guy. I like him." My wife replied, "That doesn't mean anything Honey. You like everybody." I have been burned by that, but it does help me stay in your Stage Three. Not always, I'm as human as everybody, but I think it has been beneficial to me overall. I like the Stage Three that you describe.
I would. Because he is male. This is a biological fact and when it breaks down to the difference between biological fact and honoring someone's affectations my eyes begin to glaze over. I will honor the chosen identity of someone committed enough to transition as an adult, because I know that an almost vanishingly small percentage of those claiming transsexuality actually are dysphoric, and dysphoria is a malady no more summoned than diabetes or left-handedness. I wouldn't jump into his shit over it but if he started dictating to me or he was putting pronouns in his work email I would raise a stink.
But I would not tolerate the affectations of someone who cannot leave the topic of gender identity, someone for whom the phrase, along with "correct pronouns" and "misgendered" roll out of their mouths so readily you can hear the dust in the grooves. These are fanatics, and they are tiresome.
And in urging children to take dangerous hormones or even get surgeries. these fanatics are doing significant and tangible harm, and conservatives are exploiting them to foment outrage. Effectively.
"I would. Because he is male. This is a biological fact"
Yes, it is. But that doesn't necessarily affect what I call him. Some black people find it offensive to be called "coloured." I think this is silly. But I still won't call them coloured. I'm not denying reality by avoiding calling someone something they don't want to be called. Trans women are trans women. I'll happily go that far in the name of politeness.
Where I draw the line is calling someone something they're not. I wouldn't call a black person "white." I won't call a straight male a lesbian. I won't call a male a woman. Because women already exist and they are distinct from males.
I didn't mean I would set out to start a fight. Politeness is a virtue but denial of reality isn't.
I keep returning to the fact that the great majority of the "trans" world is fake, and when "trans" stops being edgy they'll find another way to get their extra ration of special attention. Just as there are a lot of gays who are despondent because being gay is no long extraordinary. Or, as they called it. "fabulous."
"Colored" sounds so 1950s.
I won't use "trans" because I refuse to go along with all the ploys that the activists are using to expand their numbers. Think you might be "trans?" Quick! Get sliced before you have time to change your mind! I can choke out "transgendered to female" but that's the best I could manage.
By the away. agreed ant TaraElla. She is the only sane on I ever ran across on Medium. I was on there again, didn't say a word to any of the "trans" people, just wrote and software, and after three weeks of not logging in I did so and saw a red box. That's it. I'm done. Most of the articles suck anyway. OK, sour grapes, but it's true.
"I was on there again, didn't say a word to any of the "trans" people, just wrote and software,"
What?! That's insane! I cannot get over the social pressure this issue exerts. Even during the height of the "racial reckoning" I don't think people were as touchy about racial wrongthink than they are about trans wrongthink today.
I completely stayed away from the "trans" posts, didn't mention anything in a response. The most objectionable thing I wrote was to tell an idiot who writes hundreds of articles about "code smells" that his title was at least halving his readership. It's a stupid and offensive phrase and the guy is not a very good programmer.
I didn't even get an email saying I had violated anything, no Roger (he/him).
Medium just likes banning people.
How you get away with articles like the "trans" ones is beyond me, the way they kowtow to those people is just shocking.
This could go into a number of sub threads, so I'll just put it here. I don't think that we are a blank slate formed exclusively by environment and culture, but rather a blend of that and genetics including racial genetic characteristics. Genes quickly redistribute but Neanderthals have been extinct for thousands of years and remain in the homosapien genome. The ratio is unknown and most likely variable.
Even at some future date when quantum supercomputers are a thing, I doubt that we will be able to definitively answer that question. I/we don't know. It is therefore difficult to logically dismiss or magnify the importance of either.
The best that we seem to be able to do is observe general observations, but then that is the stuff of stereotypes, and we know where that can lead without proper caution. Does it matter if those observations are genetic or cultural as far as how we navigate life?
You think Barack Obama "identified" as black to gain benefits? You think the colour of his skin was an advantage during his presidential run in a country that had, until that point, only ever elected white men to the office of president or vice president? You have a pretty serious uphill battle to argue that one. 😅
And more to the point, all of these people (with the exception of Dolezal obviously), is 50% black. That's hardly "passing for black." In fact, they'd have been legally required to categorise themselves as black for most of the 20th century. As was anybody with more than one eighth black ancestry (i.e. if they had even one black great-grandparent).
Black people are *identified* as black in America. Often even when it makes very little sense to do so. And bear in mind, it's been less than 60 years since black people were allowed to use the same water fountains as white people. I don't think there are many white people lining up for the "benefits" of being black. Certainly not in America.
I'm old enough (septuagenarian) to have personal memory of "Whites Only", "Colored in back" and interracial marriage being illegal. I've seen tremendous change in my lifetime. Those who deny it are disingenuous or willfully ignorant.
America is a 𝙨𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙤𝙛 𝙡𝙖𝙬𝙨 and there is nothing that I can do by law that a black person cannot, so I sometimes quibble about "systemic racism." The system has been corrected, but at the same time some level of racial bias persists to a degree that it could be considered to be ubiquitous. People do find ways to get around the system and exercise discriminatory practices. 𝑰𝒕'𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒏𝒐𝒘.
When all is said and done, white people would overwhelmingly choose to stay white if a magic genie in a bottle offered them the opportunity to be black. I call bullshit on anyone denying that.
"You’re telling me a European American with almost no experience and pedigree could waltz into the presidency cause he gave one good speech (no red/blue America, just a purple America)"
How can you possibly ask this question after a Trump presidency?! He didn't even have to give a good speech!😅 What experience and pedigree did he have? Do you think for even a second that a black man could have behaved as Trump did and won the presidency? Obama "waltzed" into the presidency? Seriously? I'm not saying white people didn't vote for Obama. I'm saying it's wild to claim that being black gave him an advantage and then to admit that "pale faces pick presidents" in a largely pale face country. Obama lost the white vote, remember?
And are you saying that segregation only existed in the Deep South? Sure, de jure segregation was limited to the south. But de facto, it was practiced all over America. The fact that black people could drink at some water fountains isn't really the point is it? Considering the state sponsored discrimination they faced.
You wouldn't have wanted to be a black person anywhere in America before, at the very least, 1968. And realistically speaking much later than that. There is a lot of room between antebellum America and the civil rights act. And none of it was good for black people.
I'd be the first to admit that some people overstate claims of racism nowadays. Things today are nothing like 60 years ago. But it's mind-boggling to me that some people believe the playing field has been levelled. Never mind that black people now have the advantage.
As I've been at great pains to point out racial and trans issues are categorically different (I think I'll write an article specifically about this at some point soon). And one of the key reasons is identification. Trans people identify as something that, biologically speaking, they aren't. They have to ask to be referred to in the way they prefer and use makeup and hormones and surgery to appear more like the sex they identify as, because otherwise, everybody would refer to them by their biological sex.
The comparison here is Dolezal and only Dolezal. And she was widely vilified for her dishonesty.
Black people, even mixed-race people like Obama or Smullett, are identified *by other people* as black. If they asked to be referred to as white, they'd be seen as self-hating and dishonest by black *and* white people. African ancestry is visually obvious at a quarter or so (or an eighth sometimes, hence octoroons) and because of the black/white dichotomy in many people's thinking, people with that ancestry are usually categorised as black in America. Elsewhere in the world that's not so common. You're acting as if the classification is their choice and this is 100% backwards.
p.s. Thanks for the kind words. Don't worry, I only very rarely take disagreements personally.😁
Before the Proclamation to have a single black great-great grandparent, 1/16 black, meant that one was automatically a slave. People who from every appearance were as white as the plantation owner were still classified as black.
"Unlike biological sex, which predates humans by eons, race is a social construct and is fairly arbitrary. Yet "woke" activists claim the exact opposite, talking about sex as if it's something we can take on and off like a sweater, and race as if it determines every facet of our being."
Absolutely nailed it. I'm going to write about his at some point soon.
Your son, a trans man, didn't bubble up in the conversation. Perhaps trans men are not thought to be threatening, or as vocal, but I've really heard very little about them. Some time when it fits into the conversation it could be informative. Issues different from the issues of trans women. Does he share your views on the separation of sexual biology and gender dysphoria? Part of a trans community or living life as "normally" as possible? By that I mean not having "trans" as a primary focus. Is that possible in today's zeitgeist? If it's too personal, feel free to ignore my questions.
Race is no more a "social construct" than biological sex.
The fact that there is something of a continuum in melanin content doesn't justify this soft-headed notion because there is more to race than melanin. Had the major races been geographically separated long enough they would be mutually infertile and literally different species.
What terrible times we are living through, so barren.
*actual* transgender people, OK. I will not use those "cis" and "trans" words except in derision. I've known several genuinely transgendered people and know them to be real. I've been intimate with two. And I know the medical statistics on dysphoria and am away that about a thousand times as many are making the claim than those statistics would predict. So it is statistically defensible to take the default position that "they're all fake," which I would but for those few I have actually known. Because "fake" is over 99%
Ig dysphoria is not prerequisite for transgender then transgender is elective and to so elect is to adopt what is clearly nothing more than a fad, an adoption for the sake of attention. I don't like fads, I don't like attention whores, and I detest people who feel the need to tell everyone what pronouns need to be used to refer to them .... when they aren't around. I'm glad to not live in a country where I am likely to run into this crap, I couldn't stand it.
"Race is no more a "social construct" than biological sex"
I mean, it pretty trivially is. Even if you just consider the fact that if people from two "races" have a kid, that kid will always be a mixture of the two "races", you see how quickly the concept becomes fuzzy. This in contrast to biological sex where no such ambiguity exists except in vanishingly rare cases.
Also I've no idea where you're getting the idea that if the "major races" had remained separated (the "five races" concept of humanity has been throughly debunked. We all came from the same place) we'd be mutually infertile. This is an absolutely extraordinary claim! Homo sapiens were able to mate with neanderthals despite evolving separately for hundreds of thousands of years. Modern humans haven't faced anything like enough evolutionary pressure to make us into different species.
Whatever ideas people have in their heads about race, it's probably fair to say that there is no such thing as a racially "pure" human being on the planet today. But 99.98% of us are unambiguously male or female.
As for transgender being elective, I think we agree that there are many people, especially young people today, who don't have gender dysphoria but identify as trans. I'm more inclined to see these young people as confused or simply struggling to find identity than attention seeking. Though, I guess, most teenagers are attention seeking to some degree. We just didn't used to unthinkingly medicalise them for it.
But whatever the percentages are, I don't want genuinely dysphoric people to suffer because of the idiots. Precision in how we talk about trans issues will help genuine trans people as much as it will help the confused teens. Everybody wins if we can shut down the fanatics.
I can't completely get on board with the 'race is a social construct, but sex is not' train. Sex sets limits biologically. The purpose of life, from the very beginning of primordial soup, is to perpetuate more life, by any evolutionary means necessary. Today, we mammals are a sexually binary species. We've evolved to reproduce in a specific, widely spread way because it's been so successful. We have specific roles to play regarding impregnation and gestation/production. Biology says transwomen can't have babies and transmen can't get anyone pregnant, even if they buy the best vagina/penis money can buy.
The 'limitations' of race are different, and less remarkable. There's very little black and white people can do that the other can not and only one 'limitation' I can think of: Producing a baby other than what they look like. White people can't produce black or Chinese babies, black people can't produce white or Chinese babies, Chinese people can't produce white or black babies.
And when two people of different races get together, they produce a baby that isn't strictly one race or the other, regardless of how it looks. How that baby gets treated is due to the construct of humans deciding that one look/race is superior to another. But men and women have much more pronounced biological differences. Biology rules in the end.
And eventually, I think transracialism will become a thing, and it will be much easier to accomplish than convincing gender-switching. Like it or not, it's coming. For everyone.
"And when two people of different races get together, they produce a baby that isn't strictly one race or the other, regardless of how it looks."
I mean, you've pretty much made the argument for race being (mostly) a social construct here. I'd just go a step further and point out that pretty much nobody is strictly one race of the other in 2022. Regardless of how they look.
There are biological realities to ancestry, of course. I don't think any serious person is denying this. But the notion of "race" (note how you slipped into calling Chinese people a "race" here) is a lazy, scientifically debunked and largely counterproductive way of addressing the actually complexity of geographical ancestry.
Take macaws. Every species can mate with any other, even between genera, and produce hardy and fertile offspring. I had a Harlequin Macaw, Blue and Gold x Scarlet.
Yet there are still distinct macaw species, no question about it, though they rarely hybridize in the wild, sometimes they flock together.
To say that race mixing invalidates the idea of race is not an argument.
As for "trans," if they are nor dysphoric then they are fake. Pitiable desperate people but not transgendered. And, from all I have seen, attention freaks.
Why on Earth are we talking about macaws? Are you arguing that black people are a different species to white people? I suspect not. So I'm not sure what point you're making here. I'm not saying that race mixing invalidates the concept of race. The point I was making there is that race is different to sex.
The idea of race has already long been invalidated by the fact that we understand genetics far better than we did when these concepts originated.
Although I hate the racism that falls out of othering people of different racial groups and I am a race mixer, I like the beauty of the diversity. I do not wish to see the logical extreme of vanishing race thru that mixing. That's not some replacement theory crap. There is so much beauty in the shades of skin tones, the various colors of hair and eyes, facial features, etc. that I do not relish the idea of it all vanishing. I think we should be able to rid society of the bigotry without ending all that beauty in its splendid diversity.
"I think we should be able to rid society of the bigotry without ending all that beauty in its splendid diversity."
I don't think mixing will eliminate diversity, there's plenty of variation amongst people of the same "race" today. Though yes, it will inevitably smooth off the extremes. But I think we have plenty of time before we've even come close to mingling out our diversity. Hopefully we'll have long since gotten rid of the bigotry before then.
Darwin's finches ended up as separate species. As it happens we were never separated geographically at all.
Look, Steve, I'm not Heinrich Himmler. But separated populations of one species over time become separate species. There is no reason to think humans would be any different.
I had a good smeck when that supremacist learned he was 17% black.
Your last graph got to the point I have been trying to make. The fakes are taking resources that the authentically transgendered need. I saw one video about some idiot girl who had storned out of work in tears because her coworker refused to "they" her. I wanted to slap her face SO bad.
"Look, Steve, I'm not Heinrich Himmler. But separated populations of one species over time become separate species"
😁 I know that. I'm just saying that evolution is far more complex than you're portraying it. Yes, some species diverge to the point where they can't interbreed. Others, lions and tigers for example, are still able to breed despite significant time evolving separately.
Yes, it's *possible* that some groups of humans might, after an enormous amount of time and under some currently unknown evolutionary pressure, have become mutually infertile. This is just as likely to have happened within groups of humans we erroneously think of today as the same "race." But I see no justification at all for the certainty with which you made the claim.
You put a lot of effort into that. The fly in the ointment is that the genes that go with nothing about human traits that a value can properly be assigned to are the ones that make "race" visible. Racists latch on to that.
I have performed electrical, mechanical and plumbing tasks. Connectors for those things are gendered according to physical characteristics that even children understand without explanation. You cannot treat the genders of those things as a social construct unless having your house burn down, flood or your automobile fall apart is OK with you. It took a little time, but I understand that trans people are using words long familiar to me in a new way. I understand that and can get past its dissonance. I won't participate in a debate where someone claims that the mental construct defines the physical with radicals. They do a disservice to the honest trans-people.
Race has a different relationship between the physical and attitudes. My daughter's 23andme DNA adventure makes it quite clear that there is an actual definable physical reality to "race." But my wife and I didn't burst into flames when we had sex and our children were in no way defective because of the racial differences.
In the grand scheme of things those differences are small, even though they are unambiguously observable in my wife and me, our daughters less so as an observable blend. They've heard the words, "What are you?" and "Where are you from?" many times. Asians are thought of as foreign by both black and white Americans.
How small are the differences? We all have more Neanderthal DNA than 90% of the people in the 23andme database, and our daughter has a little more than either my wife or me since some of our DNA is different. You couldn't look at any of us and say, "Neanderthal, Neanderthal!" and that is non-homosapien genome. They have a list of stuff that that DNA might make us more prone to, but they are things that other humans are also prone to without that DNA.
I would say that racism, but not race is a social construct. 𝘐𝘧 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵. We 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 completely ignore "race" and I think it possible 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒅𝒂𝒚 if we can get past the "Oh woe is me, I'm a victim. You owe me because of the sins of our ancestors" stuff. If that sounds like I'm saying who is the biggest impediment to good change, yes, yes, I am. I mention that because I see the trans-radicals as the biggest impediment to change. If you walk around with a chip on your shoulder, daring people to knock it off, some will see the best way of doing that as knocking you down. And you can count on it, someone will.
All that to say, we cannot honestly deny physical reality, but we can productively shape our attitudes about it (when it matters and when it shouldn't). Unfortunately, that is often difficult even without the radical assholes ruining conversation.
Imagine if we were forbidden to call plugs and pipe fittings male and female.
That goes to the heart of the matter. It is imperative that we don't abandon acknowledgement of reality with a dystopian destruction of language to achieve political ends.
While the slippery slope argument is technically a fallacy leading to logical extremes, we now live in a world of those extremes. To be fair and decent humans we do sometimes position ourselves on that slope where the issue becomes, how far down the slope do we dare stand?
The trans movement borrows from many social justice movements. The complaint that they just need to be 'heard' and are 'being shut down' is taken straight from feminism's playbook. I heard the 'women are being silenced' BS so much from the Medium Misandrist Mavens that I wrote an article about how women who can't shut up about how oppressed they feel are always going on about how they aren't 'heard'. Maybe they're just being shut out by people who are tired of hearing the same-old same-old.
There is no group less unheard than the trans movement. In fact, they're way better at feminists at being heard because no one's going to stop a man from saying his piece, whereas women are easier to intimidate. Many women still are unheard, but the ones who are heard the most are the ones who complain the loudest.
It's bullshit that either women or transwomen are not being 'heard'. What they *mean* is that they're not being persuasive.
"It's bullshit that either women or transwomen are not being 'heard'. What they *mean* is that they're not being persuasive."
Yep. Or to put it even more bluntly, they're not getting everything they demand.
Or to put it even more bluntly, they're not getting everything they demand"
... right away,
Their problem is that they want to be seen and believed to be women, or men in the case of trans-men. I can understand that desire, but when it becomes a demand people don't fall in line with what they think is unreasonable. I have a surprising to myself empathy and sympathy for their plight. I've spoken to people still employed in the corporate world, and they have the ear of HR. Misgendering (sic) is reaching a level of a white person using the N-word (escorted out the door with your stuff in a cardboard box). To say that they are not heard is preposterous. It will bring resentment at a level disastrous to their cause.
Gender dysphoria is three times more common in men than women; one in 30,000 men and one in 100,000 women. Yet there has been an enormous surge in young women claiming to be "trans," up 4000% since 2006. I don't believe for a second that this is some environmental factor like earlier breast development (traced to soaring fat content in alleged American food) nor is it more candid reporting.
Said it before, saying it again: no dysphoria, no "trans." The activists call this "medicalizing" what should be a "choice." This infuriates. Well, in real dysphorics the sense of being in the wrong body is so agonizing that some suicide, and if that isn't a medical condition then I don't know what is.
“I see exactly the same problem with ‘anti-racist’ activism.”
Substantively off topic, but Steve, I love you for saying “exactly the same” rather than “the exact same.” I am literally over the moon.
Haha! Given that we've found this linguistic common ground I won't comment further on you playing fast and loose with the word "literally"😉
hat tip
I don't think I've written this here before, I beg pardon if I have but.
I see bigotry as Stage Theory, like Piaget's intellectual development or Kohlberg's moral development.
Stage One; unrepentant mindless bigot. Comfortable using the N-bomb, hates everybody; black and brown people. Muslims, Asians, gays. This needs no further explanation.
Stage Two: What we are calling "woke." Race is a social construct, interfertility and melanin continua mean that there are no races, a "trans" woman is really a woman. There are no categories and any acknowledgement of differences is indistinguishably extreme bigotry. This is better than One but it is likely to collapse under its own falsehood; it's just as false as Stage One.
Stage Three: Differences are real and they are not inferiorities. We accept them, maybe revel in them.
I try to live my life as Stage Three, I don't always succeed. Indians are a real challenge for me.
I may have mentioned this before, but early in my marriage I said, "Steve (actual name forgotten) is a nice guy. I like him." My wife replied, "That doesn't mean anything Honey. You like everybody." I have been burned by that, but it does help me stay in your Stage Three. Not always, I'm as human as everybody, but I think it has been beneficial to me overall. I like the Stage Three that you describe.
"I wouldn't call a trans woman a "man."
I would. Because he is male. This is a biological fact and when it breaks down to the difference between biological fact and honoring someone's affectations my eyes begin to glaze over. I will honor the chosen identity of someone committed enough to transition as an adult, because I know that an almost vanishingly small percentage of those claiming transsexuality actually are dysphoric, and dysphoria is a malady no more summoned than diabetes or left-handedness. I wouldn't jump into his shit over it but if he started dictating to me or he was putting pronouns in his work email I would raise a stink.
But I would not tolerate the affectations of someone who cannot leave the topic of gender identity, someone for whom the phrase, along with "correct pronouns" and "misgendered" roll out of their mouths so readily you can hear the dust in the grooves. These are fanatics, and they are tiresome.
And in urging children to take dangerous hormones or even get surgeries. these fanatics are doing significant and tangible harm, and conservatives are exploiting them to foment outrage. Effectively.
"I would. Because he is male. This is a biological fact"
Yes, it is. But that doesn't necessarily affect what I call him. Some black people find it offensive to be called "coloured." I think this is silly. But I still won't call them coloured. I'm not denying reality by avoiding calling someone something they don't want to be called. Trans women are trans women. I'll happily go that far in the name of politeness.
Where I draw the line is calling someone something they're not. I wouldn't call a black person "white." I won't call a straight male a lesbian. I won't call a male a woman. Because women already exist and they are distinct from males.
I didn't mean I would set out to start a fight. Politeness is a virtue but denial of reality isn't.
I keep returning to the fact that the great majority of the "trans" world is fake, and when "trans" stops being edgy they'll find another way to get their extra ration of special attention. Just as there are a lot of gays who are despondent because being gay is no long extraordinary. Or, as they called it. "fabulous."
"Colored" sounds so 1950s.
I won't use "trans" because I refuse to go along with all the ploys that the activists are using to expand their numbers. Think you might be "trans?" Quick! Get sliced before you have time to change your mind! I can choke out "transgendered to female" but that's the best I could manage.
By the away. agreed ant TaraElla. She is the only sane on I ever ran across on Medium. I was on there again, didn't say a word to any of the "trans" people, just wrote and software, and after three weeks of not logging in I did so and saw a red box. That's it. I'm done. Most of the articles suck anyway. OK, sour grapes, but it's true.
"I was on there again, didn't say a word to any of the "trans" people, just wrote and software,"
What?! That's insane! I cannot get over the social pressure this issue exerts. Even during the height of the "racial reckoning" I don't think people were as touchy about racial wrongthink than they are about trans wrongthink today.
I completely stayed away from the "trans" posts, didn't mention anything in a response. The most objectionable thing I wrote was to tell an idiot who writes hundreds of articles about "code smells" that his title was at least halving his readership. It's a stupid and offensive phrase and the guy is not a very good programmer.
I didn't even get an email saying I had violated anything, no Roger (he/him).
Medium just likes banning people.
How you get away with articles like the "trans" ones is beyond me, the way they kowtow to those people is just shocking.
This could go into a number of sub threads, so I'll just put it here. I don't think that we are a blank slate formed exclusively by environment and culture, but rather a blend of that and genetics including racial genetic characteristics. Genes quickly redistribute but Neanderthals have been extinct for thousands of years and remain in the homosapien genome. The ratio is unknown and most likely variable.
Even at some future date when quantum supercomputers are a thing, I doubt that we will be able to definitively answer that question. I/we don't know. It is therefore difficult to logically dismiss or magnify the importance of either.
The best that we seem to be able to do is observe general observations, but then that is the stuff of stereotypes, and we know where that can lead without proper caution. Does it matter if those observations are genetic or cultural as far as how we navigate life?
Uh, I didn't write that, or anything remotely like that.
And some fell on rocky ground.
"Who decides?"
I never read another word from anyone who invokes this "argument." It's the mine canary for a weak mind.
You think Barack Obama "identified" as black to gain benefits? You think the colour of his skin was an advantage during his presidential run in a country that had, until that point, only ever elected white men to the office of president or vice president? You have a pretty serious uphill battle to argue that one. 😅
And more to the point, all of these people (with the exception of Dolezal obviously), is 50% black. That's hardly "passing for black." In fact, they'd have been legally required to categorise themselves as black for most of the 20th century. As was anybody with more than one eighth black ancestry (i.e. if they had even one black great-grandparent).
See the one-drop rule (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule).
Black people are *identified* as black in America. Often even when it makes very little sense to do so. And bear in mind, it's been less than 60 years since black people were allowed to use the same water fountains as white people. I don't think there are many white people lining up for the "benefits" of being black. Certainly not in America.
I'm old enough (septuagenarian) to have personal memory of "Whites Only", "Colored in back" and interracial marriage being illegal. I've seen tremendous change in my lifetime. Those who deny it are disingenuous or willfully ignorant.
America is a 𝙨𝙮𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙢 𝙤𝙛 𝙡𝙖𝙬𝙨 and there is nothing that I can do by law that a black person cannot, so I sometimes quibble about "systemic racism." The system has been corrected, but at the same time some level of racial bias persists to a degree that it could be considered to be ubiquitous. People do find ways to get around the system and exercise discriminatory practices. 𝑰𝒕'𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒏𝒐𝒘.
When all is said and done, white people would overwhelmingly choose to stay white if a magic genie in a bottle offered them the opportunity to be black. I call bullshit on anyone denying that.
"You’re telling me a European American with almost no experience and pedigree could waltz into the presidency cause he gave one good speech (no red/blue America, just a purple America)"
How can you possibly ask this question after a Trump presidency?! He didn't even have to give a good speech!😅 What experience and pedigree did he have? Do you think for even a second that a black man could have behaved as Trump did and won the presidency? Obama "waltzed" into the presidency? Seriously? I'm not saying white people didn't vote for Obama. I'm saying it's wild to claim that being black gave him an advantage and then to admit that "pale faces pick presidents" in a largely pale face country. Obama lost the white vote, remember?
And are you saying that segregation only existed in the Deep South? Sure, de jure segregation was limited to the south. But de facto, it was practiced all over America. The fact that black people could drink at some water fountains isn't really the point is it? Considering the state sponsored discrimination they faced.
You wouldn't have wanted to be a black person anywhere in America before, at the very least, 1968. And realistically speaking much later than that. There is a lot of room between antebellum America and the civil rights act. And none of it was good for black people.
I'd be the first to admit that some people overstate claims of racism nowadays. Things today are nothing like 60 years ago. But it's mind-boggling to me that some people believe the playing field has been levelled. Never mind that black people now have the advantage.
As I've been at great pains to point out racial and trans issues are categorically different (I think I'll write an article specifically about this at some point soon). And one of the key reasons is identification. Trans people identify as something that, biologically speaking, they aren't. They have to ask to be referred to in the way they prefer and use makeup and hormones and surgery to appear more like the sex they identify as, because otherwise, everybody would refer to them by their biological sex.
The comparison here is Dolezal and only Dolezal. And she was widely vilified for her dishonesty.
Black people, even mixed-race people like Obama or Smullett, are identified *by other people* as black. If they asked to be referred to as white, they'd be seen as self-hating and dishonest by black *and* white people. African ancestry is visually obvious at a quarter or so (or an eighth sometimes, hence octoroons) and because of the black/white dichotomy in many people's thinking, people with that ancestry are usually categorised as black in America. Elsewhere in the world that's not so common. You're acting as if the classification is their choice and this is 100% backwards.
p.s. Thanks for the kind words. Don't worry, I only very rarely take disagreements personally.😁
Before the Proclamation to have a single black great-great grandparent, 1/16 black, meant that one was automatically a slave. People who from every appearance were as white as the plantation owner were still classified as black.
"Unlike biological sex, which predates humans by eons, race is a social construct and is fairly arbitrary. Yet "woke" activists claim the exact opposite, talking about sex as if it's something we can take on and off like a sweater, and race as if it determines every facet of our being."
Absolutely nailed it. I'm going to write about his at some point soon.
Your son, a trans man, didn't bubble up in the conversation. Perhaps trans men are not thought to be threatening, or as vocal, but I've really heard very little about them. Some time when it fits into the conversation it could be informative. Issues different from the issues of trans women. Does he share your views on the separation of sexual biology and gender dysphoria? Part of a trans community or living life as "normally" as possible? By that I mean not having "trans" as a primary focus. Is that possible in today's zeitgeist? If it's too personal, feel free to ignore my questions.
Race is no more a "social construct" than biological sex.
The fact that there is something of a continuum in melanin content doesn't justify this soft-headed notion because there is more to race than melanin. Had the major races been geographically separated long enough they would be mutually infertile and literally different species.
What terrible times we are living through, so barren.
*actual* transgender people, OK. I will not use those "cis" and "trans" words except in derision. I've known several genuinely transgendered people and know them to be real. I've been intimate with two. And I know the medical statistics on dysphoria and am away that about a thousand times as many are making the claim than those statistics would predict. So it is statistically defensible to take the default position that "they're all fake," which I would but for those few I have actually known. Because "fake" is over 99%
Ig dysphoria is not prerequisite for transgender then transgender is elective and to so elect is to adopt what is clearly nothing more than a fad, an adoption for the sake of attention. I don't like fads, I don't like attention whores, and I detest people who feel the need to tell everyone what pronouns need to be used to refer to them .... when they aren't around. I'm glad to not live in a country where I am likely to run into this crap, I couldn't stand it.
"Race is no more a "social construct" than biological sex"
I mean, it pretty trivially is. Even if you just consider the fact that if people from two "races" have a kid, that kid will always be a mixture of the two "races", you see how quickly the concept becomes fuzzy. This in contrast to biological sex where no such ambiguity exists except in vanishingly rare cases.
Also I've no idea where you're getting the idea that if the "major races" had remained separated (the "five races" concept of humanity has been throughly debunked. We all came from the same place) we'd be mutually infertile. This is an absolutely extraordinary claim! Homo sapiens were able to mate with neanderthals despite evolving separately for hundreds of thousands of years. Modern humans haven't faced anything like enough evolutionary pressure to make us into different species.
Whatever ideas people have in their heads about race, it's probably fair to say that there is no such thing as a racially "pure" human being on the planet today. But 99.98% of us are unambiguously male or female.
As for transgender being elective, I think we agree that there are many people, especially young people today, who don't have gender dysphoria but identify as trans. I'm more inclined to see these young people as confused or simply struggling to find identity than attention seeking. Though, I guess, most teenagers are attention seeking to some degree. We just didn't used to unthinkingly medicalise them for it.
But whatever the percentages are, I don't want genuinely dysphoric people to suffer because of the idiots. Precision in how we talk about trans issues will help genuine trans people as much as it will help the confused teens. Everybody wins if we can shut down the fanatics.
I can't completely get on board with the 'race is a social construct, but sex is not' train. Sex sets limits biologically. The purpose of life, from the very beginning of primordial soup, is to perpetuate more life, by any evolutionary means necessary. Today, we mammals are a sexually binary species. We've evolved to reproduce in a specific, widely spread way because it's been so successful. We have specific roles to play regarding impregnation and gestation/production. Biology says transwomen can't have babies and transmen can't get anyone pregnant, even if they buy the best vagina/penis money can buy.
The 'limitations' of race are different, and less remarkable. There's very little black and white people can do that the other can not and only one 'limitation' I can think of: Producing a baby other than what they look like. White people can't produce black or Chinese babies, black people can't produce white or Chinese babies, Chinese people can't produce white or black babies.
And when two people of different races get together, they produce a baby that isn't strictly one race or the other, regardless of how it looks. How that baby gets treated is due to the construct of humans deciding that one look/race is superior to another. But men and women have much more pronounced biological differences. Biology rules in the end.
And eventually, I think transracialism will become a thing, and it will be much easier to accomplish than convincing gender-switching. Like it or not, it's coming. For everyone.
"And when two people of different races get together, they produce a baby that isn't strictly one race or the other, regardless of how it looks."
I mean, you've pretty much made the argument for race being (mostly) a social construct here. I'd just go a step further and point out that pretty much nobody is strictly one race of the other in 2022. Regardless of how they look.
There are biological realities to ancestry, of course. I don't think any serious person is denying this. But the notion of "race" (note how you slipped into calling Chinese people a "race" here) is a lazy, scientifically debunked and largely counterproductive way of addressing the actually complexity of geographical ancestry.
Weak argument, Steve.
Take macaws. Every species can mate with any other, even between genera, and produce hardy and fertile offspring. I had a Harlequin Macaw, Blue and Gold x Scarlet.
Yet there are still distinct macaw species, no question about it, though they rarely hybridize in the wild, sometimes they flock together.
To say that race mixing invalidates the idea of race is not an argument.
As for "trans," if they are nor dysphoric then they are fake. Pitiable desperate people but not transgendered. And, from all I have seen, attention freaks.
Why on Earth are we talking about macaws? Are you arguing that black people are a different species to white people? I suspect not. So I'm not sure what point you're making here. I'm not saying that race mixing invalidates the concept of race. The point I was making there is that race is different to sex.
The idea of race has already long been invalidated by the fact that we understand genetics far better than we did when these concepts originated.
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/
Although I hate the racism that falls out of othering people of different racial groups and I am a race mixer, I like the beauty of the diversity. I do not wish to see the logical extreme of vanishing race thru that mixing. That's not some replacement theory crap. There is so much beauty in the shades of skin tones, the various colors of hair and eyes, facial features, etc. that I do not relish the idea of it all vanishing. I think we should be able to rid society of the bigotry without ending all that beauty in its splendid diversity.
"I think we should be able to rid society of the bigotry without ending all that beauty in its splendid diversity."
I don't think mixing will eliminate diversity, there's plenty of variation amongst people of the same "race" today. Though yes, it will inevitably smooth off the extremes. But I think we have plenty of time before we've even come close to mingling out our diversity. Hopefully we'll have long since gotten rid of the bigotry before then.
Darwin's finches ended up as separate species. As it happens we were never separated geographically at all.
Look, Steve, I'm not Heinrich Himmler. But separated populations of one species over time become separate species. There is no reason to think humans would be any different.
I had a good smeck when that supremacist learned he was 17% black.
Your last graph got to the point I have been trying to make. The fakes are taking resources that the authentically transgendered need. I saw one video about some idiot girl who had storned out of work in tears because her coworker refused to "they" her. I wanted to slap her face SO bad.
"Look, Steve, I'm not Heinrich Himmler. But separated populations of one species over time become separate species"
😁 I know that. I'm just saying that evolution is far more complex than you're portraying it. Yes, some species diverge to the point where they can't interbreed. Others, lions and tigers for example, are still able to breed despite significant time evolving separately.
Yes, it's *possible* that some groups of humans might, after an enormous amount of time and under some currently unknown evolutionary pressure, have become mutually infertile. This is just as likely to have happened within groups of humans we erroneously think of today as the same "race." But I see no justification at all for the certainty with which you made the claim.
You put a lot of effort into that. The fly in the ointment is that the genes that go with nothing about human traits that a value can properly be assigned to are the ones that make "race" visible. Racists latch on to that.
? You went from verbose to terse. What do you mean by that?